YouSaid · the spoken record

Ralph GONSALVES

lines on the record: 229
first: 2004-09-24
most recent: 2023-09-24
sittings or episodes: 11
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We are complicit in an international farce where the members of the General Assembly seat one Government as representative of the people of Venezuela while the Organization of American States, a self-described regional agency within the United Nations, seats a different, ill-defined entity, a fictitious creation of foreign Powers. We are mute in defence of the principles that have bound us together and steered us clear of world wars for the past 74 years. Principle and international law cannot be sporadically or selectively applied. Whatever the challenges facing Venezuela, they are exacerbated, not remedied, by hegemonic interventionism and compounded by our inconsistency.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“North, south, east or west, the hegemonic imperial hand is visible everywhere and the metaphoric eagle often threatens to unleash war and disorder in unilateralist vainglory. What all the world’s peoples want is simply peace, dialogue, security and prosperity. That is all we want. The sustained and coordinated attempts to engage in externally imposed regime change in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela are only one egregious example of the current trend. We are witnessing an illegal economic blockade eerily similar to the one of Cuba that we annually and overwhelmingly decry as immoral and anachronistic. We possess indisputable evidence of extensive foreign interference in the sovereign affairs of the Venezuelan people and frequent, unambiguous threats of military intervention.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“I refer to a neighbour that pollutes our residence, sends noxious emissions into our homes or facilitates it, burns fires at our boundaries and smokes us out, commits egregious wrongs against us and is justly subjected to the requisite remedies of compensatory damages and restraining injunctions. A different type of metaphorical storm is wreaking havoc with the bedrock principles that undergird this Organization. The rising tide of hegemonic, unilateral and interventionist interference now threatens to inundate entire nations, while responsible States turn a blind eye to their responsibility to speak and act in defence of central tenets of the Charter of the United Nations.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has long considered the failure of major emitters to set and honour ambitious mitigation pledges to be an act of hostility towards the very existence of small island developing States. As hundreds lie dead in the Bahamas and thousands more climate refugees are denied safe, temporary haven in the industrialized capitals of the nearest major polluter, those acts of hostility are brought into sharper relief. No nation that contributes to killing us and closes its eyes, ears and doors to our suffering can truly proclaim friendship with us with a clear conscience.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“Measured by gross domestic product per capita, the Bahamas is a high-income nation, too rich to be eligible for many forms of concessional financing, assistance in building resilience or post-disaster support. Measured instead by size, location, geography and the immutable laws of nature, its vulnerabilities are starkly apparent. Before the fury of Mother Nature, our islands are equally vulnerable and must be equally assisted by any mechanism that purports to address the impact of climate change. There is a small island State exceptionalism that must be factored —juridically, and in a non-discretionary manner — into the architecture of global partnerships on this existential matter.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“This week, the Secretary-General held a Climate Action Summit to confront our persistent paralysis in the face of the accelerating climate catastrophe. Stripped of the crafted eloquence, the Summit reconfirmed that there are basic litmus tests for a commitment to climate action — the enforcement of binding emissions targets aimed at keeping global warming below 1.5°C, investments in clean air and renewable energy, and the provision of easily accessible adaptation financing that prioritizes the most vulnerable nations. Surely the catastrophe in the Bahamas must finally put to rest the fiction that arbitrary and inaccurate measures of wealth are of greater import than the self-evident vulnerabilities of small island developing States.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“At United Nations gatherings, this tale has become sickeningly familiar. Only the names and locations change. Sadly, hurricanes are merely the most violent manifestation of the insidious effects of climate change. The floods, land degradation, droughts, landslides, coastal erosion and unreliable weather patterns across our region and elsewhere around the globe create increasingly insurmountable daily obstacles to life, living and production in vulnerable nations, particularly small island developing States. For us, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are a composite, integrated whole on which our very existence depends.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“Faced with a common threat, ample warning and overwhelming scientific consensus on its past causes, future effects and present solutions, the international community has dithered endlessly and impotently. As emissions continue to increase, legally binding limits are recast as voluntary targets and the worst offenders hypocritically highlight the specks of pollution in others’ eyes to distract from the beam in their own. At the same time, many needlessly suffer and die while indisputably urgent global action is intentionally thwarted by selfish short-termists and convenient climate-change deniers. Today we are gathering in the wake of indescribable horror in the Bahamas, whose citizens and residents were terrorized by Hurricane Dorian. Weeks after the storm, hundreds are still missing.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“As the original builders of our global economic and political architecture descend into jingoistic isolationism and succumb to the narrowest pursuits of short-term self-interest, it is the small, the poor and the historically marginalized States of our global village that present the last, best chance to restore the crumbling edifice of international cooperation and the principles on which that cooperation rests. With multilateralism battered by a resurgence of base, dishonest pandering to narrowly partisan interest groups, and with great-Power intrigue driving nations further apart, by necessity small island developing States will prove to be the glue that holds together this international experiment in unity, discussion and joint action. The rapid acceleration of climate change is the menacing manifestation of a failed multilateralism.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“As Robert Nesta Marley, a great poet of our Caribbean civilization, once paraphrased the Book of Psalms in song, “the stone that the builder refuse, will always be the head cornerstone”. As it was in biblical and musical verse, so it is in modern geopolitics. Small island developing States (SIDS), ignored by the architects of the modern world order, are now increasingly indispensable to understanding and solving the challenges of our day.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“Ours is a flame of respect for sovereignty, diversity of views, dialogue, peace and development. In changing times, and amid new challenges, the principles that fuel that flame must be zealously defended. As keepers of that flame and as holders of those principles in trust for future generations, we cannot falter and be found wanting in the face of reactionary assaults. Another way is possible, and that way, that path, is lit by the timeless principles that continue to animate and invigorate the best efforts of the United Nations. Long may those principles continue to guide our collective journey of peace, prosperity and people-centred development. What, then, is required of us? The answer is as timeless as it is wise. What is required of is to do justly, to love mercy and to work humbly with our God.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Our international agenda for corrective action also includes trafficking in persons, illegal drugs and small arms, refugees from ravaged lands, violence against women and children, the growing scarcity of water and food in many nations, the war against chronic non-communicable diseases, the rising tide of religious intolerance in certain places and the reunification of families arising from abductions of yesteryear. We live amid frantic attempts in diverse quarters to rekindle the dying embers of xenophobia and unilateralism in pursuit of a past glory stuffed with mythology. But this noble institution is the keeper of a different flame. Our bedrock principles stand as an open rebuke to those who traffic in base triumphalism and pursue actions that are fueled by both short memories and short-sightedness.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“The relevance of this institution is rooted in its responsiveness to the needs and challenges of the peoples we collectively represent. We can and must do more to address those needs in direct and transformative ways. We must ever more diligently work to match noble intent with decisive action in pursuit of our Charter objectives. Accordingly, we urge the practical resolution of the pain and suffering of the Palestinians, the people of Yemen and those afflicted by the evil of terrorism, whether State-sponsored or not. Similarly, the madness of the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the threat of their use is a standing affront to humanity, peace and security, and therefore demands our continued collective response.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“It is why the candidacy of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has been endorsed by the States members of the Caribbean Community and why Saint Vincent and the Grenadines continues to call for reform of the membership of the Security Council to reflect modern realities and challenges. Our pragmatism affords us the opportunity to see the world as it is, unencumbered by historical or ideological blinders. The United Nations, which justly counts States with populations as small as 10,000 people among its Members, somehow continues to remain blind to the 23 million residents of Taiwan. There is simply no principled basis to deny Taiwan the right to participate in the work of the specialized agencies of the United Nations.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“As threats to international peace and security have evolved in diverse ways, so too has the need increased for a diversity of viewpoints on the Security Council. Small island States have largely and spectacularly solved the challenge of forging peaceful, harmonious societies amid many of the social, ethnic, political, historical and cultural fissures that traditionally lie at the root of many breaches of international peace and security. We have confronted those challenges not with a surfeit of weapons or dollars, but with mutual respect, dialogue and an understanding that unique situations require not static ideological solutions, but flexibility and innovation geared towards the specificities of the issue at hand. The need for more of that type of practical, principled pragmatism on the Security Council is self- evident.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has played a leadership role in the post-financial crisis response of the United Nations, the revitalization of the General Assembly, Security Council reform, the advancement of the law of the sea, small-arms control, ambitious measures to combat climate change and the global response to non-communicable diseases. Most recently, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines chaired the Administrative and Budgetary Committee of the United Nations and currently serves as President of the Economic and Social Council. In a similar manner, we feel the responsibility to bring our unique perspectives to bear on the work of the Security Council. The perspectives of small States, including small island developing States, have been historically the least heard in the Security Council.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“It is imperialism of a most insidious kind, imposed facelessly from a distance. The United Nations must urgently confront that grave and gathering menace in a coordinated and action-oriented manner. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is also making increasingly innovative forays into capitalizing on the vast potential of the blue economy, tourism, niche agricultural products and our historical knowledge in the medical cannabis industry. We seek the cooperation of our friends and partners in supporting such initiatives. The faith of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the principles and potential of the United Nations is manifest in its active participation in all aspects of this organ. In recent years, we have demonstrated that small size is no impediment to impactful contributions on the world stage.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Saint Vincent and the Grenadines continues to seek new avenues for people-centred development and economic growth amid rapidly changing realities. The spectre of trade wars poses an immense threat to our development aspirations, as does the continual tightening of the procedural noose around the throat of our banking and financial-services industries. The prospect of de-risking and the loss of correspondent banking relationships is not an individual banking or business decision but a clear and present threat to the economic viability of many small States. The modern manipulation of States’ access to global banking and finance mechanisms, whether informed by politics, stigma or indifference, is a flagrant violation of the internationally recognized right to development.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Similarly, the international commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals falters on the paucity of tangible global effort to ensure their achievement and timeline. In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Sustainable Development Goals have been adopted and embedded within our national development plans. Despite limited resources, we have created both a zero-hunger trust fund and a disaster contingency fund, innovative and unique responses to our own sustainable development needs. We have mainstreamed and prioritized goals related to clean energy, economic growth, sustainability, climate action and biodiversity. We have chalked up home-grown progress in tandem with the selfless solidarity of some of our regional and global friends and allies, but much more must be done.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Our friends and partners must recognize the fierce urgency of that unfamiliar and unprecedented climate threat and take decisive political and development action to arrest this extraordinary existential problem. Climate change cannot be handled by business-as-usual practices, however tried and true. Our global climate accords have birthed entities with the ostensible objectives of funnelling and delivering urgently needed mitigation and adaptation financing to the most vulnerable States. However, those entities place the promised support at the centre of an impenetrable web of unwieldy rules and processes that serve only to frustrate those most desperately in need of life-saving cooperation.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“The many-sided concept of small State exceptionalism ought to be placed at the centre of global discourse in order to prompt appropriate collective action. The rising seas and intensifying storms pose an existential threat to small island developing States in particular. Major emitters that fail to set and honour ambitious mitigation pledges are committing a direct act of hostility against small island developing States, and we ought to resist their recklessness in acting against our interests. Similarly, the financing of climate resilience and adaptation measures by our development partners cannot be shoehorned into the same glacially slow, labyrinthine bureaucratic processes that have stymied other cooperation initiatives.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“The result of this ignoble hand-wringing and political procrastination is that the world continues to burn while its leaders fiddle. In the space of three years, our sister island of Dominica was twice devastated, by Tropical Storm Erika and Hurricane Irma, with Tropical Storm Isaac striking that island a glancing blow only weeks ago. As I speak, the threat of a storm hangs over my country. Beyond the headlines, the story of climate change is grimly told in daily experiences of floods, droughts, landslides, coastal erosion and lost lives and livelihoods across our region. We can wait no longer. The constellation of challenges, externally caused, that faces our small States demands a focused global response that recognizes an undoubted small State exceptionalism in theory and in practice.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“No international organization is better suited than the United Nations to fulfilling its foundational Charter mandate of achieving international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian nature. Today, climate change is indisputably the defining, multifaceted existential problem that we are collectively confronting. However, the prospects for an effective international solution to climate change are rapidly receding. Our carefully calibrated climate accords are teetering on the brink of irrelevance, wounded not only by high-profile withdrawals but also by cynical and foolhardy non-compliance with voluntary mitigation pledges that major emitters have loudly declared but quietly disregarded.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“To be sure, Venezuela has enormous internal sociopolitical challenges, but unwarranted and illegal intervention is certainly counterproductive to the people’s ongoing quest for peace, democracy and liberty. Venezuela needs a peace and reconciliation mission, not a campaign of sanctions, subversion and threats of armed intervention. Constructive dialogue between and among the contending parties and personalities is urgently required. The peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have repeatedly reaffirmed that our region is a zone of peace. Our peoples are not the pawns and playthings of any nation. Our America and our Caribbean defiantly affirm that. It is a noise in our blood, an echo in our bones.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“As such, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines stands firmly against the continued interventionist assaults on the sovereignty of our neighbours in the Republic of Cuba and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The anachronistic economic blockade of Cuba is both illegal and unproductive. The time has long since passed for its complete repeal. We regret deeply that the fledgling rapprochement between the United States and Cuba has stalled, and we call for a resumption of mutually respectful dialogue between our two friends. In Venezuela, the democratically elected Government has been subjected to an unacceptable, coordinated and intense external economic assault that indirectly has also had a debilitating effect on small Caribbean nations, which have had generous arrangements of solidarity, through the PetroCaribe agreements, for example.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“That is unacceptable. Because of our undeniable reliance on that cornerstone of international law, small States are among its staunchest defenders. Every violation of the principle of non-intervention, wherever it may occur, is an indirect assault on our own survival. That principle is immutable, and no amount of heavy-handed coercion or ham-fisted inducements will cause us to abandon our overarching existential interests in pursuit of short- term appeasement. Our shared history of struggle against colonial oppression and exploitation informs not only our continuing pursuit of reparative justice for the victims of native genocide and slavery, but places us in implacable opposition to any actions by those who seek illegally to impose their will on independent nations and peoples.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“The principles of non-intervention and non-interference are of particular importance to small island developing States. Lacking military might or economic wealth, and constrained within narrow borders, we owe our existence as nation States to a global recognition and respect for the principle that no other nation — large or small, rich or poor, near or far — should be allowed to interfere in our sovereign affairs or intervene in matters properly resident in our domestic jurisdiction. Without strict adherence to those tenets, small States’ existence dangles precariously on the threads of great-Power intrigue or changing perceptions of our strategic significance. Without those principles, our international order reverts to barbarism, in which the strong are doing what they can and the weak merely suffering what they must.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“However, after seven decades, the United Nations remains the world’s only institution with the capacity and authority to enable global cooperation for our collective ennoblement. The well-chosen theme for this general debate speaks to the relevance of the United Nations, global leadership and shared responsibility. It centres on a recommitment to the bedrock foundations of the Charter of the United Nations: sovereign equality, non-interference and non-intervention, international peace and security, respect for international law and collective cooperation in solving global problems. It is precisely when times are most tumultuous and when damaging changes are upon us that principles must be most unwavering and fundamental truths must be most vigorously upheld.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“We have retreated from the ethos of integration, cooperation and consensus-building that not only animated the pre-crisis decade but is absolutely necessary to solve the global problems that confront us. In a technologically connected, increasingly educated and rapidly shrinking global village, any belated attempt to put the genies of multilateralism and globalization back into their respective bottles is a dangerous folly. Walls cannot replace bridges, isolation cannot replace cooperation and clenched fists cannot shake hands. The United Nations is not without its many systemic flaws, and the ascendancy of its unprincipled antithesis demands that we address those flaws urgently.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Economic difficulties have caused most of the major nations to look inward, eschewing the most noble and beneficial aspects of global cooperation. Craven demagogues, clothed in populist robes, have emerged to exploit economic hardship and fan the flames of division, hatred and isolation. In all corners of the globe, the jarring rise of illiberal intolerance can be causally connected to the economic crisis and its continuing impact. Solidarity has been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, illustrating the enduring prescience of the late Kofi Annan’s observation that when economic conditions are difficult, people tend to be less generous and protect themselves. The question of solidarity does not mean much to them at that time.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“One decade ago, the world was convulsed by a cataclysmic collapse of its economic order. The devastating global economic and financial crisis began in the boardrooms of greedy banks and spread worldwide, with a rapidity that exposed the shortcomings of an unethical and unregulated international financial architecture. The adverse socioeconomic impact of the crisis has been vast and far-reaching, especially for the countries least responsible for the genesis of the crisis. Regrettably, the seemingly self-evident lessons of that economic and financial catastrophe have been distorted and manipulated to disastrous effect. While the financial architecture has been quietly reassembled, with little more than ineffectual cosmetic changes, the post-crisis socioeconomic and political landscape has been radically reordered.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Let us imagine a better world, a fairer world, a peaceful world, a world with a safe and sustainable future — and let us work towards that world, unburdened by the errors of the past or constrained by the shackles of a learned helplessness, but confident, optimistic and clear- sighted about the boundless possibilities of genuine international cooperation. The universal push to transform our world is urgent and necessary. We know and feel that fundamental truth. It is time for focused and meaningful action. Let us get on with it.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“Our citizens continue to be enthusiastically engaged in the process of discussion and awareness. We call upon the European nations that created and profited immeasurably from the indefensible trade of human beings to join us in the conversation about the contours of a just and appropriate response to such a monumental tragedy and its consequential legacy of underdevelopment. The uneven prolonged aftermath of the 2008 global economic and financial crisis highlights the need for reform in all the major global institutions. We are having difficulties across the world with heavy- handed financial regulations that hamper legitimate transactions and the corresponding banking relations. As I conclude, I stress that the dream of equitable development cannot be deferred any longer.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“In Haiti’s neighbour, the Dominican Republic, the human rights crisis affecting tens of thousands of Dominican-born citizens of Haitian descent remains unresolved. As the Caribbean community and other actors have sought to persuade the Dominican authorities to respect the rights of its citizens against statelessness and State-sponsored ethnic and racial victimization, indifference on the part of the United Nations is wholly unacceptable. The Caribbean communities’ determined quest for reparatory justice for victims of the transatlantic slave trade — a native genocide — continues to gather momentum. Historians, economists and other academics, human rights lawyers and social activists across the world have coalesced into a formidable advocacy and educational force around our cause.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“The catastrophe has now killed over 10,000 Haitians and infected almost 800,000 others. The outbreak shows no sign of abating. Last month, the United Nations belatedly acknowledged its culpability while continuing to use claims of immunity to deny the victims of such a tragedy their fundamental right to be made whole. The cholera epidemic and the failure of the United Nations to address or arrest it has laid bare a shameful ethical bankruptcy and institutional cowardice through legal subterfuge. The report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Mr. Philip Alston, has called the response of the United Nations to the cholera epidemic, “morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating” (A/71/367, p. 2). We agree.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“We decry the myopia of a body that pretends 24 million people do not exist and that has forced people to choose between two magnificent exemplars of the noble Chinese civilization. Such behaviour marginalizes a vibrant population and creates space for parasitic opportunists to prostitute principle for personal gain. We must recognize Taiwan’s exemplary global leadership and citizenship and its commitment to development worldwide. It is high time that the Republic of China on Taiwan be allowed to participate meaningfully in all of the specialized bodies and programmes of the United Nations system. There is absolutely no compelling argument to the contrary. I have spoken in the past of the shameful failure on the part of the United Nations to acknowledge its indisputable role in the spread of cholera in Haiti.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“However, the schemes of yesteryear, with their dirty tricks and divisions, will fail when faced with the new solidarity that has taken root across our region. Our States, as part of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas as well as the signatories to the Petrocaribe Energy Cooperation Agreement, understand the unshakeable strength that comes from unity and the courage of our collective convictions. This year marks the inauguration of a new, democratically elected President of the Republic of China on Taiwan. The Government of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines reaffirms our continued solidarity with the aspirations of the Taiwanese Government and people, just as they have stood with us throughout our post-independence development journey.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“The people of the State of Palestine are victims of that impotence, despite the overwhelming recognition of Palestine and the obvious need for an independent and internationally supported contiguous State, where the population is able to live in peace alongside its Israeli neighbours. The people-centred and progressive leaders of Latin America and the Caribbean, who dared to dream of alternatives to an iniquitous status quo, are once again being punished for their impertinence — from the continued embargo against the noble Cuban people and the externally stoked unrest in Venezuela, to the parliamentary coup d’état in Brazil. We are entering a new but depressingly familiar chapter in a book that is already soaked with the blood of progressive heroes.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“Nowhere is that cynicism and feigned impotence more apparent than in the civil war that has devastated the Syrian Arab Republic over the past five years. The Assembly and the Security Council have too frequently turned a blind eye and stayed silent when faced with the actions of countries that have sought to fund and foment war and instability in Syria. Creative diplomacy, not military victory, is clearly the answer for putting an end to this conflict. The impotence of learned helplessness and the tyranny of failure to intervene has meant that many nations have been repeatedly and unjustly excluded from the promise of an integrated world.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“The failure to mobilize sufficiently and facilitate access to promised climate financial aid mirrors official development aid scenarios, where the majority of developed countries have failed to meet the 0.7 per cent target of gross national income that was agreed to in the Monterrey Consensus in 2002. Accessing the promised financial aid has been extremely difficult. For globalization to be legitimately transformed, it must be fully inclusive. That inclusivity must be based on the principles of sovereign equality, non-interference embodied in the letter and the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations and on an end to the cynical enabling of major Powers’ interests at the expense of people’s lives and livelihoods.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“The trajectory we face is one of rising temperatures and the mitigation pledges made by countries ahead of the Paris Agreement in December 2015 put us on track for a 3-3.5°C increase in global temperatures by the end of the century. I applaud the international community for reaching the much-anticipated Paris Agreement on Climate Change in December last year, as well as the Secretary-General for convening the high-level event on entry into force of Paris Agreement during the current seventy-first session. However, the promises made in the Paris Agreement to mitigate climate change and to provide climate financial aid are inadequate and unenforceable. Indeed, as President Obama of the United States noted in his final address to this Organization, the Paris Agreement is just a framework; therefore, we need to be more ambitious.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“We are indebted to the Clinton Global Initiative, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Caribbean Development Bank, and the International Renewable Energy Agency, to name but a few, for their invaluable support of the initiative. As major greenhouse-gas emitters continue to dither, more frequent and more intense hurricanes continue to sweep our lands and to wash away large portions of our gross domestic product. We are already experiencing the terrible effects of climate change. The spotlight on mitigation should now also be shone on adaptation, which is a more immediate concern.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“The zero-hunger trust fund employs a narrowly targeted and multifaceted set of tools that are designed to ensure that, by 2020, no citizen goes hungry. We hope that the fund will be generously supported by our developmental partners and that it will become a best practice that can be adopted and adapted in other small island contexts. Goal 7 of the SDGs calls for the development of renewable energy with particular emphasis on small island States. In our quest for affordable and clean energy, our country has heavily invested in developing its geothermal resources. We anticipate that by 2019, 50 per cent of our national energy will be geothermal and 80 per cent of our energy will come from a mixture of renewable resources, including hydroelectric and solar energy.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“We must accept the President’s invitation to rethink and redesign our global compact, not in the narrow interests of modern-day robber barons, but with people-centred programmes and policies in mind. In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, my Government has comprehensively incorporated the 2030 Agenda into its planning. It has focused on economic development and job creation, quality education, poverty eradication, the strengthening of institutions and infrastructure, renewable energy, climate resilience and the health, well-being and security of citizens. These are all central to our national medium-term development plans. This year, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines launched a zero-hunger trust fund, inspired by Goals 1 and 2 of the SDGs.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“It is a system that is broken, one that is not beyond repair, but in urgent need of reform. Globalization benefits few and is an onerous burden on too many. To use a cricketing metaphor, we must take a fresh guard. It is that urgent need for a fresh and transformative approach that adds impetus and a sense of immediacy to the President’s theme for this year’s general debate, which calls for a universal push to transform our world. In order to achieve that transformation, the President has recognized the potential of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in doing so has correctly identified our existing difficulties as being rooted in the inequities that the SDGs seek to address. Our collective quest to achieve those Goals is indistinguishable from the overarching pursuit of a fairer, more just and more equal world.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“The crescendo of voices is now borderless and cross-cutting. It is impossible to ignore any longer. The threadbare clichés of globalization’s presumed benefits are of cold comfort to marginalized nations and peoples. The latter have fasted too long at the dry spigot of promised trickle-down prosperity. The longed-for rising tide that lifts all boats has come in the form of rising seas that threaten to inundate small island developing States and a tsunami of corporate consolidations that has had a deleterious effect on small States, small businesses, small farmers and the poor. This year, we must address the chasm between our idealistic expectations and our deeply flawed realities. Modern globalization as a concept, as a rules-and- norms-based system and as an international practice is unbalanced and unsustainable.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“No matter how many global crises have been and are plainly rooted in global inequalities, powerful short-term self-interest has prevailed in the face of collective common sense. The year 2016 has seen the ripening of the fruit of that short-sighted approach. The pressure for change now comes not only from the marginalized outposts of globalization’s casualties, but internally, from within the rich and powerful nations themselves. The globalization’s discontents and its discontented have reached critical mass within the citadels of casino capitalism and consumption. That discontent has been transmitted with crystal clarity by way of the ballot boxes from Montana to the British Midlands, where the cool logic of the status quo was trumped by emotional appeals for a return, however undesirable, to past glories imagined or real.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“As that crescendo of collective wisdom has grown evermore powerful, it has become increasingly apparent that the inbuilt inequalities of our global architecture are threatening the very foundations of this 71-year-old international experiment — inequalities of access and opportunity, unequal distribution of global burdens and benefits, a system of double standards untethered from principle, a calcification of the very divisions that globalization was meant to obliterate. However, even as the voices have grown more powerful, the inequalities they decry have remained stubbornly intractable. The voices from the periphery, no matter how loud or plentiful, appear unable to rouse the core beneficiaries of a flawed system from their affluent apathy.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is proud whenever a member of our small island developing States assumes the presidency of the General Assembly. As we thank the outgoing President for his noble efforts, we place special trust in the new President to lead our Assembly at this crucial juncture. From our Atlantic archipelago to his Pacific one, we pledge our cooperation and solidarity as he discharges his important mission. With each passing year, the Assembly has heard more and more voices with greater and greater intensity chronicling the shortcomings, as well as the possibilities, of our modern global order.”
2016-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 71 (2016)
“For with love, faith, works and hope all things are possible, including a further 70 years for the better of this remarkably important global gathering. We are all labouring in this vineyard. We must have the labour of love, of love, of love.”
2015-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 70 (2015)