Excellencies, colleagues, friends,
I want to thank her Majesty and the European Union, the African Union, Brazil, Canada, Ireland and Jordan for bringing us together today on a topic that is so close to our daily work.
You all have been, for decades, solid and faithful partners to the ICRC. I am deeply appreciative and grateful for your engagement with us and for your support to us.
The Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 show what is possible when states come together and unite around the belief that a human life is a human life – no matter what side of the frontline they live on.
International humanitarian law is a testament to the feats of diplomacy. The Rome Statutes – many of you refer to accountability – are the result of diplomacy. [They show how] many innocent lives that can be saved and the suffering can be prevented.
I can only say that this will only happen if states show collective commitment and if states show resolve to uphold not only the laws but to engage with each other politically.
There is no military solution to any of today’s world’s problems. I often come back to Clausewitz. You know the famous line: “War is nothing but the continuation of politics with other means.”
It’s a good sentence if you read it correctly because in that sentence, what he said is that you start the war with the objective to return to diplomacy, to return to politics, to return to a functioning system and relationships between states.
What we are seeing today is a world that abuses politics in the pursuit of war, where war is seen as a permanent condition necessary to be upheld to achieve individual political goals.
That is something that we need to reverse – and that will not be reversed unless states come together around something that unifies them. It is what you all have been insisting on: it’s humanity. It’s our joint legacy as human beings.
Another point I want to make – and this is why diplomacy is so important – wars are not limited to a territory nowadays. You don’t limit wars to frontlines. They’re just as bad as they used to be in the First and the Second World Wars.
We speak of kill zones. We count every month 10,000 more missing people between Russia and Ukraine. We are at 275,000 missing people now.
The reality of war is still comparable to the Second World War, but not entirely because when you start a war in one place, you trigger a system.
The wars today in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East are today more and more overlapping. We follow the streams of armed groups; they are working as global organizations.
You don’t stop a war in one place any more that you have started in another. We need collective action, and as this escalation continues, more and more states will have to come together.
The whole world will soon have to come together to find a diplomatic solution because you will not be able to limit the problem to one step in the process.
The responsibility to protect civilians lies with those who hold the political power.
We have heard it from all of you that the law itself does not carry any weight unless the leaders are willing to implement it. If you’re not willing to implement something as basic and fundamentally universal as the Geneva Conventions, you are dismissive about your own constitutions because everything that is written in the Geneva Conventions is found in your own constitutions.
A human life is a human life. That’s the starting point.
The Geneva Conventions are younger still today than most of your constitutions. Don’t be dismissive of the safety of your own people by not upholding these fundamental universal agreements.
I will end by calling on all states to join the Global Initiative on international humanitarian law. I commend his Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan for his enormous courage to invite 118 states to Jordan on the 7th of December to come back to a trajectory where humanity must prevail.
We must come back to a positive vision away from war and away from destruction. We can rebuild amongst ourselves a vision of peace that is so necessary today.
Thank you.
