12 December 2022
(as prepared)
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Excellencies,
Colleagues,
Friends,
Let me begin by congratulating the Group of Friends on the work done during the last 7 years.
I sincerely applaud your commitment to the rights of children, and your efforts to advance the SDGs.
Your work is crucial because, as things stand, we are not on track to achieve our goals by 2030, and children are among the most vulnerable.
Right now, 74% of child-related SDG indicators either have insufficient data or show insufficient progress to meet targets by 2030.
This lack of data severely limits our ability to reach vulnerable children with the services, opportunities, and choices they deserve to live life to the fullest.
The lagging effects of the pandemic, the spiralling of climate change, and conflicts looming large over us have created an unprecedented set of interlocking crises.
All of which impact children. All of which impact human rights.
The right to education. The right to health. The right to security. The right to water and safe sanitation.
Sustainable solutions are, by definition, child-sensitive.
I have heard from several of you that you wish to include a child-sensitive perspective in our 15 negotiating tracks during this session.
I welcome this intention.
It means thinking about the issues we face not only through the wide lenses of human rights and sustainable development, but also through the more focused lens of the rights of the child.
In a human rights-based approach to the SDGs, we have to mainstream child rights – and gender equality – at all levels, across all sectors.
Our Common Agenda places solidarity with the youth of today, and the future generations of tomorrow at its core.
The SDG Summit and the Summit for the Future will be key opportunities to unpack what is hindering us from granting all children the rights they have been entitled to.
But, first, the Water Conference in March next year will give us the chance to fully include children in our mission to guarantee access to clean water and sanitation for everybody.
I know I can count on you throughout these processes.
I encourage you to center on children in our decision-making.
To uphold the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a key human rights instrument.
And to promote the understanding that sustainable development and human rights are not opposites, but mutually conducive to each other.
Yet, before concluding, let me also invite this Group of Friends to consider the following question:
How can we advocate for a paradigm shift at the 蘑菇视频, where rather than seeing children as passive observers of reality, we see them as individual rights holders?
Colleagues, Friends,
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
They are the most valuable and the most beautiful part of our large human family.
Their rights are human rights – and I sincerely commend your efforts in making this fact a reality.
Never forgetting that, as said by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”
I thank you.