LEADERS’ VIEWS
Emmanuel Macron President, France Rethinking multilateralism
I believe profoundly that effective multilateralism has never been as necessary as today. It must give results. It must give results for development, [the] fight against inequality, education, health care, climate, biodiversity and technology. On each of these individual pillars we need unity and we need also to do everything we can to avoid a divide between the North and South … And these solutions need to be based on the proposals of the states themselves. This is what we for example have started to do with Partnerships for a Just Energy Transition. Not having one-size-fits-all solutions for all from capitals where we go to countries and ask them to all follow the same recipe. Each country has their own path. That’s the key to sovereignty … I hope in the months to come, as soon as then, we will be able to carry out this reform of the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund], first to renew the membership … [and] the structure of capital needs to be restructured to make it stronger. The World Bank and the IMF were only conceived, balanced, calibrated at a time when the challenges were very different, when the global economy wasn’t as big, when the global population was completely different. So we need to lift these absurd taboos of blockages caused sometimes by the biggest countries which are preventing others from receiving money because they could be diluted. We need to give the capacity to act to these institutions so that they can fund the countries of the south in need … We also need to pursue our climate [and] biodiversity agendas too. We have upcoming COPs [Conferences of the Parties], very important all of them, and France will play its part, particularly with Costa Rica convening for the United Nations an important meeting for oceans in Nice in June 2025. Here [we] will have the UN Oceans Conference and we will continue our work on this. I hope a lot of you will be able to ratify what we have managed to achieve over recent years, particularly the Treaty on the Protection of the High Seas. This is crucial. And we are also continuing to make progress on the issue of water. That’s also indispensable, with the One Planet Summit on water. This is alongside Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia … I do wish to recall how pressing an issue artificial intelligence is. It’s important for all states here to
coordinate on this. We need to foster innovation, of course. We need to ensure that innovation in artificial intelligence ... is accessible to all countries of the planet so it doesn’t fuel more division and inequality. But we also need all of this to be developed within an ethical, democratic framework created by the peoples of the planet that is resolute. We cannot let some people, a few private actors, who are on the cutting edge of this innovation at the moment, think about the future of this for our peoples. This is why France, in February 2025, will convene the next action summit for artificial intelligence … I hear a lot of people say that what we need to do to the UN is just throw it in the bin, there’s no point to it, we can’t resolve conflict, why do we have it. So here, let’s show a constructive kind of impatience. We can’t just be satisfied with not being able to resolve things, … while we have a Security Council that has been blocked, that is blocked reciprocally according to each and other’s interest, while that’s still the case we’ll be able to make progress. Is there a better system? I don’t think so. So let’s make the UN more efficient, firstly perhaps making it more representative. So that’s why France, as I have reiterated, is in favour of the Security Council being expanded. Germany, Japan, India and Brazil should be permanent members, much like two countries in Africa will decide who will represent them, these two elected members will also need to be accepted. But the reform of the composition of the Security Council is not sufficient alone to make it more effective. So I wish this reform … should also change the working methods, to limit the right of veto in votes of mass crimes and also to focus on operational effective decisions that peacekeeping needs … This is why we need to be brave and audacious and to do something with the current permanent members. Address to the United Nations General Assembly, 25 September 2024. Simultaneous translation provided by the United Nations.
20
G20 BRAZIL: THE RIO SUMMIT — 2024
globalgovernanceproject.org
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease