Mr
President,
Members
of the Security Council,
I
have the pleasure to submit this statement on behalf of the Nordic countries:
Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Today’s
debate on peacebuilding and pandemics comes timely, as we are about to embark
on the formal phase of the 2020 review of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture.
The
impact of the pandemic constitutes an additional threat multiplier that risks
reversing hard-won peacebuilding gains. For many communities in conflict-affected
countries, the pandemic is a catastrophe on top of a crisis. Fragile and
conflict affected countries face the challenge of having to address the urgent
health and humanitarian impact of COVID- 19, while continuing to implement peacebuilding
efforts in increasingly complex conflict scenarios. We have also seen how the
pandemic and its devastating socio-economic repercussions can deepen the root
causes of fragility and conflict, such as inequality, food insecurity and the
consequences of unmitigated climate change. In combination with growing human
rights violations and abuses, racism and discrimination, rising incitement of
hatred and violence, as well as countless examples of the spread of
misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic, this risks escalating
ongoing conflict and displacement, fomenting new tensions, and reversing
humanitarian, development and peacebuilding progress.
We
– members of the United Nations - must therefore resolve to take immediate and
coordinated action to
effectively mitigate the escalatory potential of the pandemic, while
strengthening long-term foundations for lasting peace. Sustaining peace is one
of the core tasks of the United Nations and it must be a shared responsibility
that flows across the entire peace continuum and all three pillars of the
United Nations’ engagement.
We
encourage especially the Security Council to leverage all the tools at its
disposal to support an integrated and coordinated UN response to different
phases of often complex conflicts, including prevention and peacebuilding. In particular, we
hope to see even closer and more timely cooperation between the Security
Council and the Peacebuilding Commission..
We welcome the recently convened Informal
Interactive Dialogue between the PBC and the Security Council and encourage
continued engagement between these two bodies going forward. The PBC can offer
valuable advice, including during the early stages of mandate formulation
through to review and drawdown strategies. The impact of the ongoing pandemic
on conflict dynamics has underlined the need for peace operations’ mandates to
be adaptable to changing political and operational challenges through the
various stages of UN missions' engagement. Member state commitment, solidarity
and flexibility are essential for peace operations to deliver on their mandate.
We therefore reiterate our support to the Secretary General’s Sustaining
Peace Agenda, as well as the Action 4 Peacekeeping Agenda.
UN
special political missions and peacekeeping operations play an important role
at the country level in addressing root causes of conflict, by building
capacity an fostering continued progress on peacebuilding processes, thereby
increasing resilience to ongoing and future crises. What we do today has
bearing for the longer term. We encourage renewed commitment to integrate
efforts of UN peace operations with responses by the UN Country Team and to
ensure coherence between humanitarian, development, human rights and
peacebuilding efforts under the stewardship of an empowered Resident
Coordinator. This includes engaging all relevant actors in the design of the UN
Sustainable Development Cooperation Frameworks, as well as adopting a conflict
sensitive approach to humanitarian and development programming. These are
crucial efforts to reinforcing the link between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development and the Sustaining Peace Agenda.
Human
rights must not become a casualty of the pandemic. The obligation to
respect, protect and fulfil human rights must be front and center in our
response. Democracy and the rule of law must be upheld. The
Secretary-General’s February 2020 Call to Action for Human Rights is a
tool at our disposal that we must apply in order to ensure that efforts to
address the ongoing crisis do not exacerbate existing inequalities and root
causes of conflict, but rather contribute to strengthening resilience and
sustaining peace. We welcome the recent convening of an informal exchange
between the Security Council and the Human Rights Council and hope to see
similar exchanges happen more frequently.
From
its onset, women have been at the frontlines of the pandemic, as responders,
caregivers and leaders in their communities. Alongside the COVID-19 crisis, a
pandemic within the pandemic is happening with increased abuse and sexual and
gender-based violence perpetrated against women and girls. Making sure that
women are included in decision making, and that a gender transformative
approach is applied in all stages of peacebuilding must be our common priority.
Now we have an opportunity to constructively advance the implementation of the Women,
Peace and Security agenda as part of the short-term and long-term response
to the pandemic. To ensure effective and context specific advances on the WPS
agenda on the ground, we urge the Security Council to further utilize the
recommendations provided by the Informal Expert Group on WPS. We also
welcome the recent brief from DPPA and UN Women on COVID-19 and conflict. Ensuring
a holistic multi-stakeholder approach that advances inclusive and meaningful
participation for women, youth, indigenous peoples and persons belonging to
marginalized groups, such as minorities and persons with disabilities, is
key to
sustainably addressing the long-term implications
of the pandemic in conflict-affected settings, while sustaining momentum on
peace processes.
Partnerships
are essential,
both in dealing with the immediate consequences of the current pandemic in the
context of sustaining peace, and in working to strengthen resilience to future
crises. To this end, it is important that both the Security Council and UN
peace operations harness a broad range of capacities and expertise through collaborating
with local peace actors as well as regional and sub-regional organizations. These
entities have proven critical in the face of access restrictions imposed during
the pandemic and provide a long-term presence, remaining well beyond mission
drawdown. In a similar vein, we would like to see the UN and the World Bank deepen
their alignment of capacities, tools and resources, in support of national
governments. There is a need for integrated analysis and joint strategies. Such
a reinforced UN-IFI partnership could be leveraged to reduce the risk of
conflict, sustain peace and mitigate the long-term negative impacts of the
pandemic, by building back better and greener from the crisis, in line with the
commitments of the Paris Agreement.
The
economic fallout from the pandemic combined with the reversal of peace gains
makes it as important as ever to galvanize efforts to leverage new financing
and foster collaboration with new partners. We need to think innovatively
about ways to increase sustainable, predictable, more coherent and better
coordinated financing for peacebuilding. On the one hand, we need to
mobilize additional funding for the UN Peacebuilding Fund, which plays an
important role as a catalytic and flexible tool for peacebuilding. But there is
also an opportunity to engage the private sector more, where relevant, in
conflict prevention and peacebuilding efforts. Beyond funding, the private
sector can also support entrepreneurial action in communities to recover better
from the crisis, while mobilizing support for peacebuilding efforts. As
countries emerge from the crisis, it is critical to support skills development
and create opportunities for decent jobs in more resilient and less vulnerable
sectors and industries.
In
closing, the ongoing pandemic serves as a stark reminder of the need for
global solidarity and reinvigorated multilateral cooperation, not least in
support of the peacebuilding agenda. Our collective response will determine
how fast and how well the world recovers. In recent years, the international
community has made important progress towards a shared commitment to the
sustaining peace agenda. The different branches of the UN Peacebuilding
Architecture must now be adequately empowered to urgently do their part to
translate these principles into tangible results on the ground. The only way to
emerge stronger from this crisis and prevent future ones is through a
cross-pillar approach, which prioritizes conflict prevention and addresses the
root causes of conflict.
Thank you.