The President of the Austrian National Council Doris Bures, Speaker of the Austrian House of Representatives, attended the UN High Level Parliamentary Forum in New York City from July 5-11, 2017. She also met with UN Secretary-General António Guterres for a working discussion, which included global challenges like migration and climate protection, Vienna as a host city of the United Nations, as well as Austria’s role in reaching the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDG) for a better world.
Bures emphasized Austria’s role as a diplomatic neutral ground and an ideal location for international dialogue. ”Many Gordian Knots of international politics have been successfully disentangled in Austria,” she added.
In addition, Bures attended a reception at the Austrian Consulate-General, where she restituted a book to descendants of Holocaust survivors. The book, Der Mann von vierzig Jahren (The man of forty years) by Jakob Wassermann, which was found in the parliament's library, originally belonged to Richard Beer-Hoffmann of Vienna, who was robbed of all belongings by the Nazis and had to flee to New York, where he died in 1945. The book
