In June 2000 Geneva played host to what's being called the most significant gathering of world leaders in history. They discussed not nuclear weapons or high finance, but the everyday issues that between them confront almost all the Earth's six billion people - work, poverty and inequality - the very issues that Life has been looking at. The meeting from 26th - 30th June was a Review of progress on the pledges made at the 1995 Copenhagen Social Summit - on poverty eradication, employment and social integration. It's been dubbed the 'Justice Summit' - a special session of the UN General Assembly, and the first ever to be organized outside the UN's Headquarters in New York.

Is there any progress to report? Was it realistic, five years ago, to aim to eradicate poverty? Since 1995, the gap between the rich and the poor has actually widened, while development assistance from most industrialized donor countries has gone into decline. But Nitan Desai, the UN official responsible for the meeting, says that some commitments have been met: "There's a far higher priority being given to poverty eradication now in public policy, in aid policy, in international relations generally."

Faith Innerarity, a member of the Jamaican Delegation, maintains that poverty eradication is a realistic objective. "Look at what this world has achieved in terms of technological advances. . . Mankind has the vast resources, vast potential. Why cannot these potentials be harnessed to address very fundamental issues such as eradicating hunger from the world?" She believes that now, at the beginning of a new century, we are at a crossroads. "This is where the Social Summit has its greatest importance: in pointing the world again to the issue of equity; of social justice; of inequality; of the need for each society to provide for every citizen the opportunity to participate in economic life." And she stresses the importance of spiritual and other values: materialism and the profit motive have made us forget the principles of equity and social justice, she says. "We have thrown out the baby with the bath water."

Eveline Herfkens, Netherlands Minister for Development Co-operation, wants to use the Summit to boost international co-operation: "There is internationally a growing recognition of the need to make international institutions work better," she says. She believes that one achievement of the Copenhagen Summit was to achieve the recognition - from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others - "that social development on one hand and hard-nosed economic issues on the other are absolutely interlinked".

But has the Summit been upstaged by the street demonstrations in Seattle and Washington seen on earlier programmes of Life? Herfkens believes that it's "uneducated" to say that trade as such and the World Bank are "bad". "In a decent world where you want justice you need more international rules, not less." She says we need more and better global governance to deal with the problems of globalization. And UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown says that things will only change through the empowerment of the poor. His is not the philanthropic vision of handouts: "Poverty reduction only comes when the poor have political power," he tells reporter Steve Bradshaw.

But how can a Social Summit hope to do anything about deeply embedded gender issues affecting the health and education of women? Nitan Desai says that the very fact such issues are being discussed is a major achievement. "For the first time in human history you really have people with vastly different historical antecedents, tremendous differences in their culture talking about things like women's status in society, about children, about discrimination, about human rights, about equality, about fairness, about justice." This, as he says, is a fantastic achievement.

TRANSCRIPT Read the full transcript of The Summit