Presidents, colleagues,

I have the honour to speak on behalf of the European Union and its Member States.

We thank you for this joint briefing.

Setting priorities at the beginning of the year and ensuring coherence between the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council is a good practice. We see that it has now become a tradition, through your annual joint presidential briefing. 

As we have passed the mid-point in SDG implementation 2015-2030, our common task of accelerating the achievement of the 2030 Agenda could not be more urgent. As the Secretary-General has warned us last year, progress on more than 50 per cent of SDG targets is weak and insufficient. 30 per cent have stalled or gone into reverse. These include key targets and indicators on poverty, hunger and climate.

Counteracting these grave trends will need all hands on deck, with the work of the GA and ECOSOC fully aligned, especially towards the SDGs.

President FRANCIS,

The  EU and its  Member  States remain  staunch  supporters  of  the rules-based international order with  the  UN at its  core, rooted in  respect  for international  law,  including international  human  rights law  and international  humanitarian  law.  We support your Presidency’s strive for ‘Peace, Prosperity, Progress and Sustainability’. As we have outlined in your briefing of 16 January, the EU will support all genuine efforts to make the UN and General Assembly deliver better. This includes breaking down the silos between different committees, on issues such as human rights and climate change, rationalising the work of the committees, and making sure that the UN is not paralyzed when the Security Council is blocked. We thank you for your efforts in these directions, Mr. President.

President NARVAEZ,

We congratulate you on the energy that you have shown to revitalize ECOSOC, building on the work of your predecessors. This includes the successful Special ECOSOC Meeting on the future of work that you have held last week in Santiago. We look forward to the important meetings of this year’s ECOSOC season in New York under your mandate. Additionally to those meetings, better linking ECOSOC with the work of the G20 and the International Financial Institutions is one of the major tasks remaining for the Council. We should also continue to draw lessons from the 2022 Review of ECOSOC’s subsidiary bodies, carried out under the Bulgarian vice-presidency of the Council, to make sure that these bodies contribute in the best possible way to SDG achievement.

Digitalisation has become a crucial enabler of progress towards the SDGs, and of leaving no one behind. Developing countries need to be at the table and at the heart of discussions on the digital transformation, particularly when we discuss future governance architectures for digital and emerging technologies. Otherwise, we will only further the digital divide. The first resolution on artificial intelligence that we will adopt in the coming weeks is a stepping-stone in those important discussions. We must agree on how to reflect our ambitions for digital governance in the Global Digital Compact that will be adopted during the Summit of the Future – a defining moment for both the GA and ECOSOC, and for the UN as a whole.

In addition to development, ECOSOC and the GA have important roles in addressing the many humanitarian crises around the world. The EU fully supports the UN’s central role in coordinating the international humanitarian response to natural and human-made disasters, while enhancing strong cooperation, collaboration and coordination between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding efforts. As we continue to see states deeply diverge on many political issues, we have to ensure that both the GA Plenary and ECOSOC continue to adopt all humanitarian resolutions by consensus. Keeping the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence at the centre of humanitarian action is also vital. We need to build on recent progress in these resolutions, particularly on promoting and upholding full compliance with international humanitarian law, protecting civilians and civilian infrastructure, and safety and security of humanitarian and medical workers. We hope that the GA and ECOSOC will be instrumental in upholding these principles.

An active and meaningful involvement of NGOs is important for the functioning of both GA and ECOSOC. Civil society organisations play a vital role in addressing many of the challenges I was referring to before. We need to ensure that CSOs can contribute to our deliberations.

These are some observations in the context of today’s meeting. I thank you and look forward to the further discussion.