Greater ambition needed to improve financing for development

“This year presents us with a singular opportunity to strengthen our collective response to the challenges of eradicating poverty and hunger; to realize all human rights, including the right to development, for all persons; to prevent the worse impacts of climate change; and thereby, to also promote peace and security,” stated UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. “These are opportunities we must seize.”

Zeid’s statement, which was read on his behalf by Idrissa Kane, the UN Human Rights Office’s Regional Representative for East Africa, was delivered during the Third International Conference on Financing for Development. The conference in Ethiopia brought together the different sides concerned with finance and development, including Member States, NGOs, and private sector businesses.

The aim of the conference was to reinvigorate discussions and create a blueprint for international cooperation in financing for development that would support the next set of development goals, which will be adopted later this year.

In mobilizing all available resources for sustainable development that benefits all persons and preserves the planet for future generations, all parties must honour their most basic commitments to respect, promote, protect and fulfil human rights. In this statement, Zeid outlined several commitments including using the maximum available resources, increasing international cooperation, empowering excluded and marginalized people, and guaranteeing all people enjoy the right to food, health as well as the benefits of science and its applications.

“Our hands are not bound by resource limitations, but rather by insufficient ambition, selfishness and greed. Going forward, we must be guided not by our fears but by our compassion; not by our selfish desires, but by our legal, moral and ethical responsibilities to our fellow human beings and to the planet that we share.”

20 July 2015