1 March 2016

Distinguished Moderator, Excellencies, colleagues and friends,

It is my very great pleasure to join you here today. On behalf of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, congratulate the African Group on this timely initiative.

Great jurists from the Africa continent helped craft the contours of the right to development including Mohammed Bedjaoui, Georges Abi-Saab and Judge Keba Mbaye.  And this right is made legally binding under the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, as both an individual and a collective right - recognizing duties to all humanity.

Many steps have been taken towards realizing its vision, a quest for both ‘bread and ballots’, to honor the words of Nelson Mandela.

Although celebrated under the shadow of the many crises facing the world today, the 30th Anniversary of the 1986 United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development has helped delivered to us new children of its promise and its hope: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development and the Paris Climate Agreement are born too of the right to development, and in these we have renewed promise, are given new impetus to realize its vision and must be made newly accountable for that delivery.

The signs that we can transform peoples’ enjoyment of the right to development are with us.  By the end of last year, the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world likely fell to under 10 percent. This underscores the reality the responsibility -  that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty.

But to do that, we must tackle inequality. Despite record economic growth, millions of people have been left behind, millions left out.  Progress has been uneven.  In Africa, least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, and small island developing States but within developed countries too.

Persistent poverty and deepening inequalities are a major threat to human rights and development, and thus directly threat to peace and security.

Over the past five years, the decrease in violence that the world had experienced up to 2010 tragically has reversed. Violent crises – including in Syria, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Yemen - have killed hundreds of thousands of people and forcibly displaced more than 60 million people from their homes.

This too is the business of the declaration on the right to development.  For fully realized, it offers much needed prevention - it can address root causes and it can help meet structural challenges at all levels.

At the international level too – where some of those challenges originate in our failure to regulate globalization sufficiently. The engines of globalization - trade, investment, finance, and intellectual property and the movement of people - must be compatible with the human rights obligations of States.
Global development cannot mean that people are denied their access to essential medicines. That small land hold farmers are denied fair earnings. That the impoverished are trapped in countries with unsustainable debt.
And yet, agricultural subsidies, speculation in futures markets, vulture funds, transfer mispricing and other practices are somehow tolerated and even exacerbated by corruption - despite ample and detailed evidence that these are practices that deny people of their right to development.

• Today just 62 individuals hold the same wealth as 3.6 billion others, the poorer half of humanity.
• And reportedly around 7.6 trillion USD of personal wealth is hidden in offshore accounts with devastating impacts on developing countries.
• Africa alone is losing 50 billion USD each year in illicit financial outflows stemming from fraudulent schemes to avoid tax payments.
• Did it make into our accounts of success and failure under the MDGS that military spending in the African region increased by more than 91 per cent to reached over 50 billion USD in 2014.

Taken together, this means that each year Africa loses over 100 billion USD that could have been spent on steps to ensure the right of development.

• OECD DAC countries give 135 billion USD in total ODA. This is equivalent to 0.29 per cent of their gross national income as opposed to the 0.7 per cent they committed too long ago.

And meanwhile, climate change is compounding food insecurity and changing farming patterns, in a continent largely dependent on agriculture.

At the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights we have worked to bring greater definition and conceptual clarity to the right to development - through research, dialogue, outreach and collaboration.  But human rights are inert-dependent, as indivisible as they are universal - all our efforts are supportive of the right to development, each is directed to no the implementation of 2030 Agenda.  As the High Commissioner emphasized this morning – people who are hungry and not people who are free.  But freedom is not merely the absence of iron bars, and small cells.  The prison of prejudice, the prison of bigotry as with the prison of poverty confines freedom, stymies human talent  and creative and is always a threat to development.

Like the Declaration itself, the 2030 Agenda’s promise is “to leave no one behind”. It includes a commitment to “reaching the furthest behind first” by ensuring that SDG targets are met “for all nationals and peoples and for all segments of society”.

The 2030 Agenda is a child of the right to development. It must not be stunted by indifferent action, malnourished by failed commitments or denied safe passage to its fullest realization by the inconvenience of its tough demands.

On behalf of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, I pledge his - our - full support for the realization of the right to development for all individuals and all peoples – to the exclusion of none of us, for the dignity of each of us in the interests of all of us - on and for the continent which you hold so dear and to all others. 

Thank you.