MOSCOW, April 23-- In a 9:30 a.m. ceremony today at
Moscow's House of Political Education, the former World War II bomber pilot and
founder/head of the World Government of World Citizens, Garry Davis, presented an honorary
World Passport - based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - to Moscow's
mayor, Gavriil Popov, one of the USSR's top economists and historians, elected Friday by
the Moscow Supreme Council. The ceremony was arranged by editors of the new international
magazine Megapolis which features Davis and the World Government in its June issue,
"As Moscow is truly a world city today," Davis said in his presentation,
"united with all major cities throughout the world in common problems and humane
solutions, in the name of the entire world citizenry, I am honored and pleased to present
to you, its esteemed mayor, in the name of the world citizenry, this concrete symbol of a
world without frontiers which truly identifies the commonwealth of cities throughout our
planetary community. The right to travel freely on our home planet is today increasingly
claimed by aware humans. This passport then represents that inalienable right. That our
presentation and your acceptance of this document is your first official act as Mayor of
Moscow symbolizes that basic freedom not only for Moscovites but for citizens throughout
the entire country. Indeed the world itself has already been identified as a 'global
village'."
In past years Davis has presented the World Passport to Mayors Hitoshi Motoshima of
Nagasaki, Takeshi Areki of Hiroshima, Diane Feinstein of San Francisco, Marion Barry of
Washington, D.C., Sunichi Suzuki of Tokyo, Hans-Peter Zeufle of Wolfach, West Germany,
Harold Washington of Chicago and Wm. Reiber of St. Louis., all mayors of cities which have
declared themselves "mondialized" or "worldized." The mundialization
program was started by Davis and fellow world citizens in France in 1949 when Cahors
decided to join the world citizenship movement as a city by adopting the Charter of
Mundialization and declare its site 'world territory.' Over 900 cities have already
"mondialized."
"As declared world citizens, we accept 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' in their
fullest implications," said Davis today. "Our world is one and humanity is one.
Survival itself depends on the institutionalization of those two dynamic facts. Both war
and environmental disasters are global problems. While the political fiction of the
nation-state system is daily proving itself inadequate to address much less solve those
problems, cities, where billions now live, are making peace between themselves in the
growing realization that only world law and its institutions based on the principle of
right over might - by which all true human communities are governed - provide security,
social justice and well-being for one and all."
Davis leaves for Tokyo Wednesday, April 26 where the WSA has its "Pacific
Rim" office. His own passport contains the new International Exit Visa mandated
by art 13(2) of the UDHR as well as the International Residence Permit mandated by
article 13(1) of the UDHR citing his actual residence in Nakano-ku, Tokyo, where he rents
an apartment in his own name.
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