Fourth Annual Moscow Conference on International Security - Plenary Session - Global Security: challenges and perspective

Distinguished Ministers
Excellencies
Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is a great pleasure to be here today. Thank you to the Government of the Russian Federation for the invitation, for the excellent organization of this event and for the warm hospitality.

It is my privilege to present to you a message from Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

“I am pleased to send greetings to all participants at this Fourth International Security Conference, and I thank the Russian Federation for hosting.

You meet at a time of pressing and complex peace and security challenges on the United Nations agenda. The interlinked nature of threats, ranging from terrorism and organized crime to civil conflicts and even health crises, calls for a collective response. The stakes are high for civilians and fragile societies affected by such threats, whose impact on regional stability and national security in Member States can be devastating.

Perhaps no other situation illustrates the tragic consequences of an inadequate collective response to threats to international peace and security more than the crisis in Syria, now in its fifth year. The Syrian people are victims of the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. The impotence of the international community to stop the war in Syria should shame us all.

The continued bloodletting in Syria has contributed to the spread of dangerous new element that threatens the stability of the Middle Eastern region and beyond. The emergence of ISIL, or Daesh, with its murderous ideology, and of other violent groups like Boko Haram, exemplifies one of the central threats to international peace and security today, namely the growth of transnational terrorism and violent extremism. How the international community responds to this acutely dangerous phenomenon will be a major test of our recently frayed ability to come together for the collective good.

The United Nations is addressing this threat, including by developing a United Nations Plan of Action on Preventing Violent Extremism that I intend to present to the General Assembly later this year. That Plan will reinforce the international community’s commitment to fundamental values and human rights that violent extremists seek to undermine. This is essential to upholding the ideals of the United Nations and succeeding on the ground to defeat the threat posed by these extremist ideologies. The international community must mobilize whole societies, engaging women and young people as well as cultural, religious and educational leaders in this effort.

We are also boosting our ability to address tensions before they explode into conflicts. The United Nations is strengthening its capacity for preventive diplomacy while intensifying our focus on early warning signs of distress.

The United Nations is also bolstering our peace operations by engaging with officials and institutions from around the world to sharpen this essential tool for collective security.

Our partnership with regional organizations has also gained importance in recent years. Toward this end, I would welcome strengthened collaboration with the Collective Security Treaty Organization to promote stability in the region and beyond.

Good governance, grounded in political and economic inclusion, is the best way to prevent and counter violent extremism. Security is sustainable when populations have a shared interest in preserving State institutions rather than seeking to overthrow them.

Let us recommit to our common values to secure our common future. In this spirit, I wish you great success.”

That was the end of the Secretary-General’s message.

Allow me now to add a few observations to expand on some of the elements in this message.

We live at a time of an ongoing geopolitical alignment where many sense that the current security system is being weakened. As the Secretary-General highlighted in his message, security challenges are multi-dimensional and cannot be neatly compartmentalized. Conflict, extremism and criminality intersect to provide new hybrid patterns of instability. At the same time, the rules-based order we have built together since the founding of the United Nations is being undermined. Rules are broken with impunity. When some believe that to be powerful is the same as always being right, then countries and individuals lose trust and confidence that the system can deliver the security they need.

I have argued on many occasions that one of the fundamental underlying factors of the current destabilized global security situation is the lack of trust on a number of levels, and I welcome the focus on trust at this conference. This lack of trust manifests itself in many ways. And the United Nations is not immune. Whether in peacekeeping, humanitarian or in development work or other programmes and interventions – the United Nations has traditionally been a trusted interlocutor. But attacks on United Nations personnel have increased. These trends must be seen in the context of growing threats by terrorists and armed groups operating with no regard for international and humanitarian law, as well as increasingly complex and sophisticated transnational criminal networks. When these merge, risks of kidnapping and other attacks increase to such an extent that operations can be severely challenged.

These are very serious challenges to the security system itself and to us as the international community. Strengthened operational military and security is essential. But it is a challenge that goes beyond a stronger military and security presence, more frequent planning exercises or operational cooperation and tactical considerations, and right to the heart of the principles, priorities and structures of our system. And I believe that if we are to have a serious and forward-looking discussion about how to deliver security, we need to address those questions directly. If not, our operational discussions will not serve their purpose.

We need a much greater emphasis on prevention. Despite much progress on the preventive aspects of development aid and on preventive diplomacy and mediation to help ward off rather than react to instability and conflict, we still fall far short of the aspirations set out in the Charter of the United Nations. The fact that the United Nations now has a record 130,000 peacekeepers in the field, coupled with the most extensive humanitarian needs ever this year, is to a large extent a reflection of our failure to prevent conflict. Sometimes this has been the result of weak structures and limited capacity for early warning in the international system. But more often than not, information has actually been at hand, but there has been no political will to act on it. And all too frequently, we have not been good enough at understanding the drivers of conflict and applying a broader preventive approach.

We need better analysis and understanding of the connections across challenges. We will fail in our security responsibilities if we target our challenges purely through a narrow security lens. Lack of inclusive political dialogue and decision-making, injustice, inequality, human rights abuses, insufficient access to quality education, high unemployment levels - not least among our large generation of youth - rising food and commodity prices: these are all powerful drivers of conflict. And often they interact in ways that do not respect national boundaries. This breeds a sense of alienation and exclusion that can be and is fertile ground for extremist sentiment. But our tools and approaches are predominantly country-focused and rooted in traditional political and military-based solutions. Sustainable prevention will need to include a more explicit focus on inclusive institutions, respect for human rights and evenly distributed economic progress.

One of the most powerful avenues for prevention is disarmament. This is particularly true today due to the steadily increasing number of trans-border armed conflicts. This results in – among other things – a free flow of weaponry and ammunitions through national borders in many parts of the world. This practically unlimited and uncontrolled arms traffic has contributed to the armament and consolidation of terrorist groups and organizations, and considerable regional and global instability.

There have been some major successes in the conventional weapons area, such as the Anti-personnel Mine Ban Convention, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons’ Protocol V on explosive remnants of war, the Convention on Cluster Munitions and, most recently, the Arms Trade Treaty. Nevertheless, the successes of these instruments seem to be thwarted by ongoing regional conflicts where technologically sophisticated weaponry is used.

A more comprehensive approach to disarmament is urgently needed.

Yet, despite the value of disarmament, we have allowed the Conference on Disarmament – the world’s key body for negotiating disarmament instruments - to be mired in an impasse with no substantive progress for 19 years. The Conference has made remarkable contributions to the maintenance of international peace and security in the past. Against the impressive past of agreements on landmark instruments such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, it is shameful that the Conference has not been able to even agree on a Programme of Work since 1996 - despite the repeated efforts by many of its Member States for it to resume substantive negotiations.

There has been a cautious momentum for progress over the past year, but without any concrete outcome. I continue to believe that the Conference on Disarmament has the potential to serve again as a fundamental part of our efforts to maintain international peace and security. But we cannot ignore that the voices calling for alternative ways or venues to move forward on the issues covered by the Conference are growing stronger and more numerous.

Against this background, maybe it is time to rethink the whole disarmament machinery, or at least the CD structure, practice and methods of work. We need to ask ourselves whether with its limited membership, the Conference is still capable of producing universal conventions for the benefit of all mankind. The globe is our common home and many nations wonder why they should be held hostage to the inability or unwillingness of a few CD members to assume their responsibility and commence negotiations, particularly on a nuclear weapons convention. Together with climate change, nuclear weapons are a clear existential threat to our future.

I take this opportunity to call on the Member States of the CD to consider a thorough review of their policies as they relate to the Conference. The world has not stood still while the Conference has been unable to move forward. Yet, because of the inaction of the Conference I believe that there has been limited in-depth rethinking at the highest political levels in a number of countries of the approaches and policies in this forum, simply because there has been no need to do so. Such a review may not be a magic wand that will change the dynamics in the Conference, but it may be an additional impetus – and potentially a powerful one – for moving forward the work of this critical body.

The forthcoming review of the NPT Conference will be an important occasion for the international community to strengthen nuclear non-proliferation and to find a common way forward on disarmament.

The political framework for a comprehensive joint plan of action agreed in Lausanne with the Islamic Republic of Iran also represents a historic accomplishment. A comprehensive, negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue will hopefully also contribute to greater peace and stability in the region and enable all countries to cooperate urgently to deal with the many serious security challenges they face.

We must also think clearly ahead, in order to confront or pre-empt developments that will threaten our future collective security. This week in Geneva, we hosted a meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems - also known as killer robots. The meeting looked at how we can ensure human control over these new types of weapons. As technology advances, it is our obligation to ensure that it continues to serve us all in a positive way and does not pose unforeseen challenges to international peace and stability. This is prevention in its purest form - ensuring through collective action that a potential threat to our security is not allowed to materialize. I hope this may provide inspiration for other areas.

We are at an important juncture now to review and adjust our priorities and structures. Even over the past 12 months, we have experienced significant shifts in the security landscape, with the rise of ISIS, a proliferation of terrorist attacks with new methods and connected in new ways, and continuing or intensifying crises in Eastern Ukraine, Syria and the wider region, Yemen, Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic - and the list is not exhaustive. All of them - in different ways - demonstrate only too clearly that business as usual is not a sustainable way forward.

At the same time, the High level Panel on Peace Operations, recently established by the Secretary-General, the ten-year review of Security Council Resolution 1325 and the review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture provide valuable platforms for moving towards a more holistic view of security and towards better integration of the tools at hand. It is a rather unprecedented combination of high-level reviews of some of our key peace and security frameworks. It is an opportunity for fresh thinking.

Across the disarmament agenda and in the Conference on Disarmament, and indeed in international security generally, those States with the largest military capabilities have a special responsibility to lead international efforts to make the world safer for all of us. And we all have a responsibility - as individuals and as the international community - to confront our security challenges in a more sophisticated and sustainable manner. We all need to look carefully at how we work together to prevent crises and how we act once they have arisen. Above all, we need to get a much better balance between our preventive and our reactive capacities.

Thank you very much.