Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen

It is an honour and a pleasure to be with you here tonight in my capacity as Chair of The Elders to deliver the Kofi Annan Peace Address in this Geneva Peace Week.

But the pleasure is bittersweet, for two reasons: firstly because Kofi is a dearly missed friend. We worked together over many years, when he was Secretary-General and I was High Commissioner for Human Rights, and then as founding members of The Elders. We feel the lack of his calm voice, wisdom and moral authority more than ever in these troubled times.

This is why tonight is a doubly bittersweet occasion: it is hard to speak of peace from the comfort and calm of Geneva when so many people around the world are suffering from the cruelties of conflict, from Gaza and Lebanon to Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and countless other wars that rarely if ever make it into our headlines.

As Kofi knew instinctively and showed throughout his life, you cannot have peace without leadership, and you cannot show leadership without courage. This is why I am delighted to have the opportunity later this evening to talk to the “rising peacebuilders” supported by his Foundation. I look forward to hearing their perspectives on how to build sustainable peace that can be passed down across the generations. As Kofi so often said: “you are never too young to lead, and never too old to learn.”

While preparing for this address and observing the terrible destruction wrought by Israel’s ongoing military assault in Gaza and Lebanon, my mind turned to another quote from Kofi, this time when he was still serving as UN Secretary-General during the last open war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006.

When the UN Security Council finally agreed Resolution 1701 in August 2006 to end the conflict, he said: “War is not politics by other means, but represents a catastrophic failure of political skill and imagination.”

How true that was then, and how true it is today as we contemplate the awful cost of twelve months of killings, destruction and displacement in Gaza and now across the Middle East, following the horrific Hamas terror attacks of 7 October 2023.

Civilians are paying the price for the failure of political leaders to de-escalate and seriously address the root causes of a conflict that has been raging for over 75 years. Some 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, most of them women and children.  Hamas is still cruelly holding around 100 Israeli hostages, many of whom are now sadly feared dead. More than one million people in Lebanon have been displaced from their homes, with some even seeking refuge in Syria. Israeli civilians in the north of the country are no safer from rocket attacks than they were before this latest Israeli assault, while Palestinians in the West Bank are suffering ever-intensifying attacks from Israeli troops and armed settlers.

Without an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, the release of all hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinian prisoners and full compliance by all parties to the conflict with international humanitarian law, the situation will surely worsen. 

Leadership for peace has never been more urgent, but never, I’m sad to say, so lacking.

One consequence of this failure of leadership is the increasingly systematic violations of international law in conflict settings, and impunity for those who commit atrocities.

I do not need to remind an audience in Geneva, the home of the ill-fated League of Nations, of what can happen when extremist political leaders flaunt their contempt for the international rule of law, and their moderate counterparts cannot muster the courage needed to defend it and the institutions it underpins.

But I worry that as the United Nations, the League’s successor, approaches its 80th anniversary, the world is witnessing an alarming escalation of conflict and a steady erosion of the established norms underpinning international law. Powerful states – including some permanent members of the Security Council - are in breach of the UN Charter, and institutions like the International Criminal Court are under attack. Leaders are resorting to military aggression and retaliation, instead of the hard work of political dialogue.  Women have not been given the meaningful roles in peacebuilding promised by multiple Security Council resolutions.  

Leaders must uphold international law consistently.

In the year 2024 this should be a truism that scarcely bears repeating, but instead it is a shockingly urgent appeal. Contempt for the rules governing our multilateral institutions has a knock-on effect across all aspects of global peace and security.

Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, now well into its third year, is a flagrant violation of the UN Charter, with the Security Council paralysed by the veto. A permanent member blocking action on a conflict to which they are clearly a party violates both the spirit and the letter of the UN Charter.

Article 27(3) is clear that a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting, and I welcome the fact that the Pact for the Future, passed at the UN Summit for the Future in New York last month, specifically calls for this provision to be implemented. I encourage member states to take meaningful action to enforce this important element of the UN Charter. 

We are also seeing some Security Council members undermine decisions of the International Court of Justice and threaten – threaten - the International Criminal Court and its officials.

It is vital that our international judicial institutions are supported and their decisions upheld. International law must be applied consistently, regardless of who is being held accountable.

States who use their veto or other diplomatic means to shield their geopolitical allies are ultimately acting against their own interests, because if the international rule of law fails, we are all vulnerable to unchecked aggression and violations of our fundamental rights.

From Gaza to Ukraine and Sudan to Myanmar, we can see how impunity for atrocity crimes and breaches of international rule of law is emboldening some political leaders to scorn dialogue and political solutions, seeking instead to retain or consolidate their power by military means alone, with scant regard for international humanitarian law and at great cost to the civilian population.

So I’d like to pose a question to you, from a personal point of view - why are we seeing such a failure of leadership?

I want to express a personal reflection here, as an Elder but not as Chair, because the Elders have not discussed this precise issue.

I have come to believe that the heart of the problem is that the world has been run predominantly by male leaders. It is not that women are better than men. The truth is that the world needs the balance of differing perspectives of leadership and power. Men in power tend to be more hierarchical, more interested in hard power, less concerned about being servant leaders. Women leaders, especially those who have come out of women’s networks and the women’s movement, tend to be more collaborative, listening and problem-solving in practical ways. To have the dominance of one kind of leadership is not healthy for our world, and has contributed to the stark situation we are in. The current failure of leadership is not gender neutral.

For too long we have paid lip service to the idea of gender equality. At leadership level it should mean parity of participation in power and decision making. It should mean that roughly half the leaders in the world would be women, and that Cabinets and Parliaments should have parity of membership between male and female members. Perhaps we should experiment with co-leadership of global organisations, in order to benefit fully from the differing perspectives of leadership?

Reflect with me honestly for a moment. Do we really believe we would have as many wars, as many geopolitical divides, as many autocratic leaders with populist solutions if women exercised their due power at the highest level in our world? So it is time for a group of countries to champion this idea both nationally and at the global level.

Having said all that, we should celebrate the men who have been great leaders for peace. One such was Martti Ahtisaari, the former President of Finland whom Kofi and I both respected enormously, and with whom we worked most fruitfully as members of The Elders.

Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of his passing, and it feels appropriate tonight to recall his wise words when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008. In his acceptance speech, he reminded us that “Wars and conflicts are not inevitable”, that “All conflicts can be resolved” and that “Peace is a question of will”.

We cannot simply accept certain conflicts as unsolvable, or acquiesce to the idea that military aggression offers a lasting solution.  Nor can we limit our efforts to managing the humanitarian impact from one cycle of violence to the next.

I’ve been emphasising that Gender Equality is also Highly Relevant to Peace Making and Peace Building.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which launched the Women Peace and Security agenda, we should acknowledge that this agenda has never reached its full potential.

There have been many commendable National Action Plans on Women Peace and Security, and countries like, my own, Ireland, and Mexico and Kenya have ensured it has been placed on the Security Council’s agenda. However, it is a grim but unavoidable fact that the decisions that most affect peace and security are still primarily, and in some contexts exclusively, made by men, often the same men who resorted to violence in initiating the conflict to begin with.   

This is why The Elders are calling for the meaningful participation and inclusion of senior women in peace-making and peace-building processes to be regarded as mandatory. Those engaging in political processes seeking to end conflict – the UN or other international actors – must insist on a meaningful role for women as a prerequisite for support, not a ‘nice to have’.

We also support calls for greater investment in the essential role of women in peacebuilding, including through an increase of funding to women’s organisations working in fragile and conflict-affected states - to at least 1% of Official Development Assistance. The Secretary-General is to be commended for tracking this in his annual Women, Peace and Security report, but the level of funding is far off target, currently standing at just 0.3%.

Alarmingly, recent research indicates that this funding has decreased - from $191 million to $142 million in the past three years. Meeting this target would be transformative for these organisations, while the financing required is of course dwarfed by other funding streams – notably military expenditure.

And as we are speaking of leadership, we must also note that the post of UN Secretary-General has been held continuously by men since the inception of the organisation after the Second World War. The Elders therefore support calls that the next UNSG should be a woman, appointed through a transparent process that seeks the most qualified candidate.

Whoever the next Secretary-General is, she will inherit an organisation in sore need of comprehensive and radical reform to make it fit for the world of 2025, not 1945.

When the wider world looks to the UN, it looks first and foremost to the Security Council. But if we are honest, we must recognise that the Council is widely seen as ineffective or worse - a relic of the post-Second World War era. Reform is urgent and overdue - and it is possible.

In the 1960s, the successful drive to expand the Security Council was driven by the General Assembly. Permanent Council Members can only block Charter reform at the level of their national legislatures, and once the Assembly had voted, the P5 eventually ratified the change.

Calls to expand permanent membership are longstanding, but new, indefinite, permanent members with veto privileges would only increase ineffectiveness and repeat the founding flaw of the Council. And it is a flaw. Instead, a new category of longer term, re-electable membership on a regional basis, as some models have proposed, should be incorporated. This would create positive and democratic incentives for longer term presence on the council.

The veto remains the core problem in the working methods of the council, and the Elders call on member states to sign up to initiatives that seek to prohibit the use of the veto where populations are being subjected to, or threatened with, genocide or other mass atrocities. 

If the veto cannot be fully eliminated in the short term, models and practices that limit its use and increase its political costs must be supported.

The General Assembly must again play the lead role in reform, and the Elders call for a coalition of member states to lead a reform proposal that increases both the representation and effectiveness of the Council.

Beyond this, the international peace and security architecture must evolve to tackle not just the multiple destabilising conflicts across the world, but also the existential threats facing all humanity – the climate and nature crisis, nuclear proliferation and the risk of pandemics.

We see the climate and nature crisis and conflict fuelling each other. In my work as a member of President Zelenskyy’s High Level Working Group on the Environmental Consequences of the War in Ukraine, including during two visits to Kyiv last year, I have seen extensive evidence of crimes against the environment as part of Russia’s war of aggression.

We are also gaining an increasing understanding of the complex, but very real, structural effect that the climate and nature crisis is having on conflict globally. Changes in climate that affect livelihoods and living conditions, from rising sea levels to desertification and destruction of arable land, lead inevitably to changes and tensions that can directly increase the risk of violence and conflict. 

On another existential threat, despite the threat of nuclear conflict being at its highest point since the Cuban missile crisis, we are seeing an unravelling of the agreements that have mitigated the risk of a global nuclear war.  Instead of pursuing disarmament, as they have committed to under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, nuclear states are modernising and increasing the arsenals that threaten all of humanity.  And they are spending billions each year, money that could be much better spent elsewhere.

We are approaching the five-year anniversary of the outbreak of a pandemic that killed millions and cost trillions. Yet our leaders have not yet delivered a meaningful pandemic treaty that would protect us all from the health, security and other risks that will come with future outbreaks that science tells us are inevitable, and that we are currently seeing play out with mpox.

I repeat my concern about the dominance of male leadership, without the balancing perspective of female, and even feminist leadership. It is a real problem.

Long-View Leadership

Let me conclude with The Elders’ call that the only way to tackle these complex interlinked threats is through long-view leadership.

Long-view leadership means showing the determination to resolve intractable problems not just manage them, the wisdom to make decisions based on scientific evidence and reason, and the humility to listen to all those affected.

Long-view leaders must have the moral strength to address both current concerns and long-term risks, taking on vested interests where necessary, and prioritising a better future for humanity over short-term political gain.

Kofi Annan was a long-view leader throughout his life. So was Nelson Mandela, the founder of The Elders, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, our first Chair. And so, I hope, will be the young peacebuilders to whom I will speak later this evening.

Only through dialogue, solidarity, determination, compassion and humility can we overcome the challenges of today and tomorrow, and build a world with peace, justice and human rights for all.

Thank you.