EU Statement – UN General Assembly 5th Committee: Programme plan and programme budget for 2023
Mr. Chair, dear Philippe,
I have the honor to speak on behalf of the Member States of the European Union.
The Candidate Countries Türkiye, North Macedonia*, Montenegro*, Serbia*, Albania*, Ukraine, and the Republic of Moldova, the country of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidate Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Georgia, Andorra, Monaco, and San Marino align themselves with this statement.
I would first like to thank the Secretary-General for the presentation of his Proposed Programme Plan and Budget for 2023. Furthermore, I would like to commend the work of Mr. Francis Saudubray as chair of the Committee for Programme and Coordination during its sixty-second session. I would also like to thank Mr. Abdallah Bachar Bong, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, for the presentation of the advisory committee’s report.
Mr. Secretary-General,
The United Nations are called upon to respond to unprecedented global challenges in a flexible and yet integrated way. It is the fundamental responsibility of the Fifth Committee to ensure that the Organization has the means to match the ambitions and deliver the mandates we collectively set.
As staunch proponents of effective multilateralism, we subscribe to “Our Common Agenda” and your call to ensure the sustainable financing of the UN. We therefore welcome your 2023 annual budget and commend your continued efforts to make the UN budget more effective, efficient, result-oriented, transparent, and focused on the people who need it.
We also welcome the improvements that aim to make the budget presentation less fragmented, with the frontloading of resources for recurring mandates of the Human Rights Council. We ask that you continue to strive towards even more transparency so the budget provides an accurate picture of the resources you need to deliver mandates.
We are of the view that the planning and budgetary process should provide enough flexibility for you, Mr. Secretary-General, to strategize and manage for performance and results. To deliver on your vision, and achieve our shared goal of a United Nations that works better for all and allow for meaningful, diverse and effective youth engagement, we need to complete the implementation of reforms and ensure they fully deliver on their objectives. We therefore reiterate our unwavering support to your reform agenda, and our aim to increase accountability of all program managers. A cornerstone, the annual budget cycle has already fostered a culture of performance in the Organization; it has improved the UN’s agility in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; and it has enhanced its much needed reactivity in the troubled times we are witnessing.
However, the Organization can only fully deliver results if it has adequate liquidity. While we welcome the recent improvements in this regard, we remain vigilant and need to collectively uphold our responsibility and pay our contributions in full and on time, to enable the full execution of mandates.
Mr. Chair,
The main duty of the Fifth Committee is to enable the Organization to pursue the full implementation of all the mandates given by Member States. To that end, we will seek to adopt the 2023 Programme Plan and the 2023 Programme Budget in a timely manner.
On the programmatic side, the Fifth Committee will be able to rely on the outstanding work of the Committee on Programme and Coordination during its 62nd session. The modalities of the CPC session, and the willingness of its full membership to actively engage and find consensus proved instrumental to adopt recommendations on a greater number of programmes. The availability of budgetary documents in all official languages sooner also helped and allowed for effective multilingualism and the necessary inclusivity of the debates. This also applies for all Fifth Committee documentation where we genuinely appreciate the efforts of the language services to implement the increased productivity standards for translators we adopted two years ago; we would like to acknowledge and appreciate their support and contribution to our work.
We regret, however, that the CPC could not reach consensus on five important programmes: relying on other main committees of the General Assembly, which already have heavy programmes of work of their own, to provide their conclusions and recommendations to the Fifth Committee where CPC cannot, should be the exception and not the norm. The role of the CPC should be upheld, not diluted and transferred to these Committees and therefore, we reiterate our plea for CPC members to reach consensus on all 28 programme plans in the future.
When the Fifth Committee considers the proposed programme budget in detail, we will strive to make sure that our collective decisions enable the Organization to continue delivering on its three pillars of human rights, peace and security, and sustainable development - - based on the rule of law and mindful of the Sustainable Development Goals. We will be especially vigilant when it comes to the funding of mandates that protect and promote of human rights, particularly women and girls’ rights, and humanitarian assistance mandates, whose fundamental importance has been further highlighted with the unprovoked war of aggression of the Russian Federation on Ukraine. The Member States of the European Union are concerned with the ability of the United Nations to fully deliver on these mandates and we are committed and determined to protect, improve, and advance those programmes, while encouraging an efficient use of resources in a context where the resources requested so far for 2023 represent a 4.5% increase over the resources allocated for 2022.
In closing, Mr. Chair, let me assure you that the European Union and its Member States look forward to working closely with all groups and delegations with the aim of agreeing on a solid, resilient and balanced UN programme budget for the year 2023.
I thank you, Mr. Chair.
* North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania continue to be part of the Stabilisation and Association Process.