24th General Assembly of the Students’ League of Nations

Dear Students, Dear Teachers, Dear Friends:

Welcome to the Palais des Nations!

It is a pleasure to be with you again this year to open the General Assembly of the Students’ League of Nations.

This really is one of the highlights in my calendar every year. So let me first of all say thank you to the International School of Geneva for organizing it again.

Looking around, it feels like we have the whole world in this room, and with it, the beauty of its diversity.

Today and tomorrow you will experience first-hand the thrill of multilateral diplomacy.

The challenge, as always, will be to find common ground with your colleagues while promoting your own objectives and positions.

This balancing act is really what being a good diplomat is all about. I am looking forward to learn what you will achieve.

In a speech a long time ago to young people like yourself, the humourist Art Buchwald was quite brief, saying simply: “Remember, we are leaving you a perfect world. Don’t screw it up.”

Unfortunately, you are not going to hear that message much these days. Instead, if you open the newspaper – or perhaps your Facebook News Feed – what do you see? Violent conflicts across the Middle East, terror threats in Europe, wildfires in the United States, flooding in the Caribbean, tensions on the Korean peninsula…and the list goes on and on.

And then there are larger concerns that you hear about: The Earth is warming; we are running out of water and other vital resources; we have a billion people on the globe trapped in terrible poverty.

So against all of this, let me sketch out some counterpoints to think about.

First, the world is largely at peace. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period. This is not an abstraction. You are less likely to be killed in war today than at any time in human history – the number of people killed as a result of war is down 75% compared to every decade since the end of the last world war.

Second, poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years. A person born today is less likely to be poor, less likely to be unable to read, less likely to die of diseases, than at any other time in human history.

Third, the creativity of our time is unprecedented. 90% of all scientists that ever lived are alive today. To understand the incredible pace of progress, just consider this: the cell phones in your pockets have more computing power than the Apollo Space Capsule that landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969!

I am telling you all of this not to say that everything is in fact fine. But what these examples do show is that our actions matter.

Today, we have the expertise, knowledge and human capital to move things forward. What we now need is the political will for bold action. If we have that, no challenge is too difficult. I really believe that.

Your discussions at the General Assembly will cover some of the most difficult challenges we face – access to fresh water, weapons of mass destruction, the situation of heavily indebted poor countries, and sexual discrimination. I have to say – I am impressed by your vision and courage in choosing these issues.

As you head into your negotiations, let me share some thoughts on each of these topics:

First, access to water.

The first thing to realize is that there is actually enough fresh water on the planet. The problem is bad economics and poor infrastructure. The result is that every year, around half a million people – mostly children – die from diseases transmitted by contaminated water. Making matters worse is that droughts often affect some of the poorest countries which already suffer from hunger and malnutrition.

Water stress is a multiplier of other challenges. Think about it: water is so fundamental to our basic needs that without it – or with too little of it – economic and social development become secondary concerns.

The bad news is that without meaningful action, this is going to get even worse. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2025, half of the world’s population will be living in areas affected by fresh water shortages.

The good news is that this challenge is clearly on the radar of world leaders. As you point out in the draft text, Goal 6 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development explicitly calls for clean water for everyone.

Water shortage has long been a focus for us at the UN – in fact, it was already a focus when I joined the UN 39 years ago.

UN Water – our interagency coordination mechanism – brings together UN funds, programmes and agencies as well as other actors such as civil society groups.

This is important because there must be a holistic approach to the challenge – which means not only looking at water shortage itself but really tackling the ‘Why’ and the ‘How’ of the problem.

In practice, this means we need to:
̶ Protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, rivers and lakes.
̶ Increase water-use efficiency and water resource management.
̶ And we need to also focus on resolving conflicts and settle disputes that arise over water and which affect the most vulnerable most.

The second issue you chose to tackle is disarmament.

This one is as tough as it is important. The use of nuclear weapons should be, by logic, unthinkable. They were part of the horrors of the last century, and should have no place in this one.

And yet, disarmament efforts are paralyzed. The risk of proliferation is higher today than at almost any time that I can remember.

Meanwhile, the threat is not static. Technological advances mean that nuclear weapons become cheaper to produce and smaller and easier to transport. There was a time when only the two biggest superpowers of their age could develop them. Now, even non-state actors – including terrorists – could get their hands on one. The point is, we simply cannot overstate the threat they pose to global security.

And if the threat is global, so too must be our response. Every single country has a responsibility.

I mentioned that water shortage has been an issue for the UN even before I started working here. Nuclear disarmament has been an issue for the UN even before I was born!

In fact, the first ever General Assembly Resolution – in 1946 – dealt with precisely this. It is also fitting that you are discussing this here, in the Palais des Nations. You will continue the proud tradition of this place – going all the way back to the days of the League of Nations – for hosting historic negotiations towards disarmament.

And it is not that there is no good news whatsoever. This year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is a really impressive organisation, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), based here in Geneva. What they have done is combining the power of civil society – the voices of citizens in over 100 countries – to call for a world free of nuclear weapons. Their pressure was critical to agree the latest Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by 56 countries by now, – another small but encouraging sign of progress.

But that is just about the nuclear problem. We are now facing the challenge of how to regulate the use of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, as weapons. An equally daunting, but very urgent, task.

There is some momentum you can build on in your negotiations. At the end of the day, wouldn’t it be terrific if we could use the incredible amounts of money that we spend on nuclear and other arsenals towards peace and prosperity?

Which brings me to your third resolution, which wants to assist poor countries in removing barriers to economic progress and social development by cancelling their debt payments.

Foreign debt of states can become a crippling factor that keeps countries trapped in poverty.

Recognizing this, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank around twenty years ago launched an initiative to ensure that no poor country faced a debt burden it could not manage.

Since then, the international financial community has been working together towards reducing the external debt of some 36 countries to sustainable levels.

This is encouraging but not enough. If you ask me about the key challenges of the 2030 Agenda, how to finance it - that is, money – would be near or at the top of the list.

What we need are funding opportunities – above all for least developed countries – to unlock investments in bridges, in schools, in hospitals. That is what will make or break the whole project. So tackling debt and the global distribution of wealth is not only a question of justice. It really is about the success or failure of the whole Sustainable Development Agenda.

Finally, let me turn to your fourth resolution, on discrimination based on sexuality and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As you rightly point out, discriminatory laws still criminalize consensual same-sex relationships in 77 countries; in five countries there is even a risk of the death penalty.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons also face discrimination through everyday practices at home, in school and at their workplace. Changing the deeply embedded homophobic and transphobic attitudes is not easy, and change does not happen overnight.

But we have seen steady progress over the last decades, and this is encouraging. It really is as Dr. Martin Luther King once said: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

In fact, protecting LGBTI persons from violence and non-discrimination does not even require the creation of a new set of rights. All we need is the full implementation of existing international standards – not least the many Human Rights Conventions adopted since the creation of the UN – into national laws, policies, and actions.

With these four draft resolutions, you have a foundation for a rich and critical discussion.

I was particularly encouraged to see that two of the four drafts directly reference the Sustainable Development Goals. Because these 17 Goals really are our common roadmap. They structure everything we do here in our effort to create the world we want to live in by 2030.

They do so because they give a framework to think about challenges in a way that is holistic, that is integrated, that is comprehensive. They do not leave anyone behind – and this also means they take everyone on board.

This is why I really encourage you to frame the solutions you offer through the prism of the Sustainable Development Goals. Not because it is new and fancy. But because you will find goals, targets and indicators of progress related to your specific themes that have already been addressed by the international community and whose implementation efforts are now geared towards the agreed direction.

You will find action on disarmament in Goal 16 on peaceful and inclusive societies, Goal 13 on climate action and Goal 3 on health and well-being.

You will find access to drinking water in the specific Goal 6, but also in Goal 2 on zero hunger and Goal 11 on sustainable cities and communities.

You will find the ambition to promote economic progress and social development in Goal 1 on no poverty and Goal 17 on global partnership.

I wish you much success in your negotiations, and I really look forward to reading your final texts. And beyond that, I hope your experiences today and tomorrow will inspire you to great achievements in the future.

Thank you.