Director-General/Executive Director
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,
The many distinguished speakers who came before me have addressed the extremely complex situation and challenges facing our multilateral system. What I would like to do during my brief intervention is to offer a ray of hope.
Amid the challenges to multilateralism, we have recently seen a notable success story, when Member States agreed the final draft text of a UN convention on cybercrime last month, after a four-year process.
The Ad Hoc Committee that elaborated this text held eight formal sessions both in Vienna and New York, with strong participation from Member States as well as around 160 stakeholders from civil society, intergovernmental organizations, academia, and the private sector.
At the outset, countries’ positions were starkly divergent, but the common and urgent threat of cybercrime managed to bring them closer together to approve the text by consensus.
We at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime are proud to have acted as Secretariat to the Ad Hoc Committee.
And I believe that this experience holds some useful lessons for wider efforts to revitalize multilateralism.
We learned that focusing on common global threats, and identifying very concrete actions to address these threats together, can rally Member States.
We learned that letting women lead can help us break new ground, as we watched a woman ambassador lead the Committee to success.
We learned that emerging issues such as the misuse of new technologies can inject some productive urgency into multilateral cooperation.
We learned that the voices of civil society and the private sector can help steer conversations away from geopolitics and towards community, technical, and practical concerns.
And we were reminded that the convening power of the UN can still bring all countries together, on an equal footing, to produce tangible outcomes.
The issues facing multilateralism are undoubtedly much wider than the specific context of cybercrime, and we need unprecedented steps to move towards a multilateral system fit for the 21st century where trust is regained.
But the cybercrime treaty is proof that multilateralism endures, and that countering transnational crime is central to the global agenda and can only be addressed if we and Member States work together.
Organized crime groups are making sophisticated use of new technologies and becoming more flexible in their structures and operations.
More than ever, they represent a threat to peace, security, and development, warranting a more coordinated and robust response from the UN.
The Pact for the Future will help re-focusing on the values of the UN Charter and fostering dialogue around universal common interests and concrete joint actions can contribute to enhancing multilateralism for a more peaceful and secure world.
Thank you.
