I am so sorry that we have not been able to meet together for so long. I feel especially sorry that the conversations we started with many of those here on digital development and digital underdevelopment have been discontinued. But brainstorming sessions, hackathons and similar events have continued online, in particular delivering fresh ideas at lightning speed on how to best overcome or circumvent the circumstances into which we were all suddenly thrown.
I am proud that we all rushed online globally to reach out to each other, provide educational support, develop e-court services and to the extent that we could, deliver via contactless systems. My special acknowledgement goes to the Chief Prosecutor of Kenya, who has made sure that Kenyan people can turn to the courts and receive verdicts even when they are unable to travel or meet. Kenya will not turn back, because even when travel is safe again, why should someone make a trip of hundreds of kilometres to be heard? That is an encouraging example. Through the tears we have shed for our lost ones and from the despair and devastation, solutions have emerged that will enable our societies to become better and more egalitarian. I hope all Governments that have seen the benefits of online service provision will continue down that avenue. It helps people from rural areas and women with small children who are unable to go and queue at Government offices. It helps people with special needs have better access to what societies can offer them.
There is another positive takeaway from the pandemic. If we truly concentrate our financial and scientific efforts globally on a problem, we can overcome it, but only if we really feel its urgency. I feel encouraged about the fight against climate change, which is at least as dangerous to the human race as a pandemic. That urgency is now widely accepted. We will overcome climate change someday. The day will come when humankind will be able to look back and find that we have reduced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That will not be the day when we see planet Earth calming down. The unexpected storms, the heatwaves in places with otherwise moderate temperatures and the snow in regions that are not used to its cold bite will continue even when we have stopped the trend of rising emissions. However, it will be the day we give back hope to our children. From that point on, they can hope that the planet will slowly get better again.
If we can now stop climate change by following the attitudes of more supportive Governments towards the weak in societies and finding the same fervour that we all had in the quest for vaccines, future generations will recognize this decade of this century as the great recovery. If we fail, it will be seen as the beginning of the end. I hope it will be the former, but even if that hope is justified, there are many other urgent problems that we need to focus on while keeping the big picture in the forefront of our minds.
Last Saturday, people in more than 160 countries across the globe united to clean up the world. In the past three years, more than 50 million people across the world have joined that initiative. World Clean Up Day, launched by Estonians in 2008, is now one of the largest civic movements of our time, uniting approximately 160 countries around the world for a cleaner planet. The simple act of cleaning has become a force that binds together people and groups who would otherwise never dream of working for the same goal. It is a great example of the grassroots power of people united by technology and the will to do something themselves to save our planet. But while our people can organize themselves
and do much by and for themselves, they may not be able to do it all, because conflicts still ravage many countries and new ones have emerged. Wars continue to be fought from Ukraine to Syria. Authoritarian regimes such as Belarus, for example, have come up with new hybrid tools to attack democratic societies with innocent people. Those who suffer the most continue to be the most vulnerable in our societies — women, children and adolescents.
When I visited Afghanistan in April, I had the opportunity to meet people who had grown up in a society of reconstruction and hope for the future. The women worked as midwives and had the chance to go to school and work, take care of their own families and assist others with their knowledge and experience. Today, their future looks grim, to say the least, as does the situation in the whole country. Their humanitarian needs are enormous. Approximately half of Afghanistan’s population, more than 18 million, is in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, including women and children. As the United Nations Global Advocate for Every Woman Every Child, it makes me sad that the progress seen during the past two decades in Afghanistan could be reversed so quickly. While despairing for Afghan women’s right to participate in society in any normal way, we must not forget that the opportunities for women and children globally have been hard hit by the pandemic. Even the most developed countries are not exempt.
The statistics on women’s participation in the workforce and their proportion among the unemployed, the number of women unable to receive ante- or postnatal care and the number of children deprived of school meals are the silent testimony, a dark shadow, of the pandemic — the shadow pandemic. The situation was not good even before the coronavirus disease hit. For example, we were not on track to reach our Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger by 2030. The data gathered by the H6 Partnership institutions, with which I work as United Nations Global Advocate, predict that we will have to rethink many of our development strategies in order to gain the ground lost in pandemics and then some. The shadow pandemic of starvation and the lack of access to education and medical care will continue, at least until we manage to vaccinate the global population, and then it will take yet more time to reverse the negative trends. Estonia is contributing at least 900,000 vaccine doses. Almost every adult in Estonia who gets a shot donates one to someone else globally. Without vaccinating the global population, there will be no way to even start the recovery from the shadow pandemic. We are all responsible for the future, and we all have to do our part.
On 17 September, Estonia, together with our Baltic friends Latvia and Lithuania, celebrated our thirtieth anniversary of joining the United Nations. Thirty years is a bit more than one human generation. Today Estonia is an elected member of the Security Council. Over the years, we have not only been consumers of security but also responsible security contributors in various regions of the world, from the Sahel to Afghanistan to Iraq.
In March 2019, as the president of the fourth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly, Estonia led the adoption of a ministerial declaration whereby countries all over the world agreed to create a global environmental data strategy by 2025. The strategy foresees the development of common data standards and an increase in the quality of environmental data. It also aims to foster cross-border data-sharing and interoperability and improve countries’ environmental monitoring capacities and data analysis methods. To support the process, Estonia is launching a global alliance—the “data for the environment alliance”—that will bring together countries interested in improving the quality and accessibility of environmental data and developing digital solutions. Since environmental problems cross national borders, we should do away with all borders when using environmental data. The alliance will be launched during the fifth United Nations Environment Assembly in February 2022. Every country can make a difference, regardless of its size.
In the nineteenth century, the importance of a nation was based on its natural resources and territory. In the twentieth, it was based primarily on military force. Today, a country’s main resource is its people — not merely as tools of production, but as individuals with rights and freedoms, as well as their unbounded imagination, ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Only truly free people are creative enough to thrive in the twenty-first century, and only democracies can give their people that freedom. That is why democracy, human rights and the rights of nations are the most important tools for peace and prosperity. Long-term peace and prosperity can be born only of respect for basic rights.
In Estonian minds, the technological transformation cannot be separated from respect for those basic rights and freedoms. The digital transformation and the integrated data economy present one of the greatest opportunities for our future and can make our countries more efficient. That is particularly important for small countries with limited resources.
There is also another important aspect of digitalization that we can never forget, which is digital technologies as an equalizer. Last year, in order to prevent the emergence of digital inequality and division, Estonia and Singapore co-sponsored a global declaration on the digital response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, entitled “Close the Digital Divides: the Digital Response to COVID-19”. Of course, the value we can extract from tools is contingent on their utility — the manner in and the purpose for which those tools are used. We must not help repressive States become more efficient. Instead, we have to help those that want to use digital tools for the benefit of their citizens, not their detriment and oppression.
It is important for Estonia that the basis of our cooperation is formed by shared values, principles and interests, all of which fundamentally hinge on trust, especially trust created through digital means. At the recent Tallinn Digital Summit, we discussed how to utilize trust, transparency and the free flow of data to make large-scale, cross-border infrastructure investments trustworthy. The collective concern of Governments and international organizations demonstrated the need for a shared framework to underpin our cooperation — Trusted Connectivity. The framework articulates the common vocabulary, interests, values, principles and standards we need to safeguard democracy and ensure that democratic countries respond to the global demand for physical and digital infrastructure by offering an alternative of a higher quality and higher standard to those connectivity providers that do not share our love of free societies. Estonia has been among those working to create a normative framework for responsible State behaviour in cyberspace since its early days. At its heart is international law, including the Charter of the United Nations in its entirety, international humanitarian law and human rights law. As the host nation of the independent Tallinn Manual, which is starting its third run, we emphasise that wholeheartedly.
As an elected member of the Security Council, we were pleased to host the Council’s very first official discussion on cybersecurity earlier this year (see S/2021/621), which enabled us to raise awareness on threats to international peace and security stemming from the malicious use of cyberspace and to create momentum for the implementation of our existing framework. Discussions on cybersecurity and cybercrime must ensure that we make a concentrated effort to implement the rules of the road that we already have. We cannot go down that road without bringing companies and civil society along.
Legal frameworks are of the utmost importance, but laws alone do not protect us. We also need empathy, democracy, the rule of law, good governance and the flexibility to adopt changes caused by COVID-19, among other things. Countries are exporting what they actually are and what happens inside their own country. Countries that repress their people also spread fear to other countries and societies. That is why we have to talk about the repression in Belarus. We must stand in solidarity against the aggressive and destabilizing behaviour of Alexander Lukashenko’s regime and continue to believe that the will of the Belarussian people should be the main guideline for shaping the future of the Republic of Belarus.
That is why we cannot forget about the occupied Crimean peninsula or the situation in Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has our strong and unwavering support for its sovereignty and territorial integrity and for the non-recognition policy of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Security is indivisible. Ukrainian security is also ours. As an elected member of the Security Council, we continue to keep the issue of Russia’s aggression in the Donbas and the illegal annexation of Crimea on the Council’s agenda.
That is also why we must talk about migration flows affected by instability and unrest in different continents. That is why Estonia supports the idea of a summit for democracy, hosted by President Biden. That is why Estonia, for its part, is hosting the next Global Conference for Media Freedom in order to boost the synergies of the Internet and media freedom in a context where journalists and media workers are more and more dependent on Internet freedom and modern technologies. Advancing media freedom also goes hand in hand with combating disinformation. That is why we continue to support the rights of women and girls around the world. There can be no democracy, security or development without half of humankind.
When looking at the future, we need to talk about the rights and protection of children, particularly in situations of conflict. In Afghanistan, at least 45 per cent of the population is children under 15 years of age. They need protection, access to education and health care, or we will add to the never-ending cycle of conflict.
Estonia, as an elected member of the Security Council, has placed special emphasis on the full, equal and meaningful participation of women in peace processes and on the fight against sexual and gender- based violence. We have tried to give a voice to women human rights defenders by inviting them to brief the Security Council. We were also able to draw attention to the ever-deteriorating situation of children in armed conflicts, which has been further amplified by COVID-19. But we know that is by no means enough.
Tangible action is needed more than ever. The United Nations relies on cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character. However, solidarity is achieved in practice only if we follow the principles of solidarity every single day. There is great potential for solidarity in the United Nations, regardless of the problems we are collectively facing. If there is a will, there is always a way. We remain ready to serve the United Nations.