Bangladesh

I warmly congratulate Mr. Sam Kutesa on his election as the President of the General Assembly at its sixty-ninth session. I also congratulate Ambassador John Ashe for his leadership of the Assembly at its sixty-eighth session. My appreciation also goes to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for his stewardship of our endeavours to realize our common vision of a world of peace, dignity and well-being for all. Four decades ago, in his maiden speech before the General Assembly, the Father of our nation of Bangladesh, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (see A/PV.2243), described his vision for a global order, saying that the Bengali nation is pledge-bound to establish a global order, one based on peaceful coexistence, social justice and freedom from poverty, hunger, exploitation and aggression. That vision continues to guide Bangladesh’s national development policies and our engagement in global affairs. We gather at a time when the global development discourse finds itself at an important juncture. As the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) approaches its deadline, the global community is engaged in framing a transformative development agenda for 2016-2030. The theme for this session of the General Assembly is therefore quite timely. Bangladesh believes that our deliberations will help us to arrive at a balanced, pragmatic and ambitious agenda. We cannot achieve sustainable development in the absence of durable peace and security. The volatile global security situation continues to pose significant challenges to international development. Bangladesh believes that a threat to peace anywhere is a threat to humankind as a whole. In keeping with our position of principle, we continue to express our full solidarity with the Palestinian people in their legitimate struggle for self- determination. We condemn the systematic killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, by Israel during the recent offensive in Gaza. We seek a permanent solution to that long-standing conflict through the creation of an independent and viable State of Palestine based on the pre-1967 borders and with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital. Bangladesh strongly believes in the centrality and legitimacy of the United Nations as the custodian of global peace, security and development. Our commitment to international peace is manifest in our support for the flagship resolution 68/125 on a culture of peace and non-violence. Our peace leadership is further reaffirmed through our support to the United Nations as one of the top troop- and police-contributing countries in the Organization’s peacekeeping endeavours. We have so far contributed 128,133 peacekeepers in 54 peace missions. Bangladesh proudly contributes the highest number of women police to United Nations peacekeeping, commensurate with our credentials in the empowerment of women. Terrorism and extremism remain major impediments on the road to global peace and development. My Government maintains a zero-tolerance policy with respect to all forms of terrorism, violent extremism, radicalization and faith-based politics. We remain firm in our resolve not to allow any terrorist individual or entity to use our territory against any State. The anti-liberation forces remain active in attempting to destroy the progressive and secular fabric of our nation. They resort to religious militancy and violent extremism at every opportunity. Under the direct patronage of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-Jamaat-e-Islami Alliance Government from 2001 to 2006, they coalesced to form terrorist groups that carried out bomb and grenade attacks and killed secular political leaders and activists. Those gruesome attacks cemented my resolve to create a strong legal and regulatory regime for countering terrorism, including the adoption of the amended Anti-terrorism Act of 2013 and the Money Laundering Prevention Act of 2012. My Government is also seeking to entrench democracy, secularism and women’s empowerment in order to defeat terrorism and extremism ideologically. We have also significantly enhanced transparency and accountability in governance by strengthening our election, anti-corruption, human rights and information commissions. To uphold peace and the rule of law and end the culture of impunity, my Government remains pledge-bound to bring to justice the perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, rape and acts of genocide committed during our 1971 war of liberation. The highly transparent, impartial and independent international crimes tribunals in Bangladesh have already completed the trials of a few key criminals who carried out heinous crimes against humanity. We hope for the international community’s full support for our people’s desire for this long-awaited rendering of justice. Our Government has integrated the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) into our national five-year plan and Vision 2021, a people-centric programme that aspires to transform Bangladesh into a knowledge-based, technology-driven middle-income country by 2021. Bangladesh has already met or is on track to meet the first six MDGs. Poverty rates have fallen from 57 per cent in 1991 to below 25 per cent today. During the past five years, our gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate remained at 6.2 per cent, despite a global recession. Our export earnings grew more than threefold from around $10.53 billion in 2006 to more than $30.5 billion for the last fiscal year. Remittances have also almost tripled, from $5 billion in 2006 to $14.5 billion, while our foreign currency reserves jumped six and a half times, from $3.49 billion in 2006 to $22 billion today. In an effort to unlock Bangladesh’s development potential, we have undertaken some massive infrastructure and connectivity projects. We have begun work on a 6.15-kilometre bridge over the great river Padma using our own resources. We will soon begin developing a deep-sea port in Sonadia, Chittagong. We are already working on upgrading our road and rail infrastructure, including expressways and river tunnels. We have reached agreements with friendly countries such as India, China and Japan to develop large-scale power plants to meet our growing demands by 2021. We are developing 18 economic zones around the country to enable potential investors to invest in Bangladesh, especially in the context of our growing integration into the regional connectivity framework. Bangladesh enjoys a clear demographic dividend, with two thirds of its workforce young, employable and capable of remaining economically active till 2031. One of our policy priorities is investing in skills development for our increasingly youthful population. With a view to developing a knowledge-based society, we are rapidly building the capabilities of our country and people in the area of modern information and communications technologies. Our people currently receive more than 200 types of service from more than 4,500 union service and information centres, while rural populations have access to health-care services from more than 15,000 information-technology-connected community health clinics and union health centres. These networks enable us to bring various crucial public services to our people’s homes at an affordable cost. Bangladesh has 117 million SIM cards with more than 78 per cent telephone penetration and 50 million Internet connections. Bangladesh’s strides in education have enabled us to achieve the MDG targets of ensuring universal primary school enrolment and gender parity in primary and secondary schools. Our Government provides students with a free education up to the twelfth grade and provides 12.8 million students, 75 per cent of them girls, from poor families with monthly stipends from primary level to graduation. Each year we distribute around 318 million free textbooks to all students up to the secondary level. We are now focusing on improving the quality of education to enable our boys and girls to acquire essential life skills and grow up with a truly global outlook. For us, sustainable development implies the empowerment of women and their equal participation with men in all walks of life. Our efforts to promote women’s empowerment by enhancing their access to productive resources and representation at the national and local level are producing visible results. The Government’s pragmatic policies have helped leadership by women grow from the grass-roots to the highest levels. Bangladesh may be the only country today where women concurrently occupy the positions of Prime Minister, Speaker, leader of the opposition and deputy leader. In the judiciary, administration, the civil service, the armed forces and law enforcement agencies, 10 per cent of posts are reserved for women, as are 60 per cent of primary-school teaching posts. With a view to ensuring equality, my Government has established numerous social safety-net programmes that cover more than 24 per cent of the population, notably feeding and development programmes for vulnerable groups; the Ashrayan poverty alleviation project, which provides housing and income generation for the homeless; monthly pensions for senior citizens, widows, destitute women and the disabled; maternity allowances; and food and nutrition security for rural dwellers through one-house, one-farm schemes aimed at promoting family farming. Persons with disabilities are provided with education, skills development and interest-free credit for self-employment, with a 1 per cent jobs quota reserved for them in the formal sector. The MDGs have been the most successful global anti-poverty push in history. It is due to them that the world is seeing 50 per cent less poverty than in 1990, as well as more girls in school, fewer children dying and more people with access to safe drinking water and sanitation. However, progress has been uneven and unequal within and among countries and regions. Sadly, more than 1.3 billion people still live in abject poverty. As we reflect on our new and emerging development challenges, eradication of poverty must remain at the centre of the post-2015 agenda, and we must build linkages from it to all other goals. Our new framework must achieve a balance between the three pillars of sustainable development, and it should particularly keep in mind the importance of access and the unique circumstances and diverse needs of countries such as Bangladesh. I am pleased that the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals has used a rigorous, broadly inclusive process to come up with recommendations for a set of interlinked goals and targets. In Bangladesh, we have held national consultations and remained intensely engaged in the global process. We consider the set of goals and targets a carefully balanced package and a crucial basis for the post-2015 development agenda. The future development agenda must address low-income developing countries’ long- standing constraints on resources and capacity in a meaningful way and respond to emerging risks and vulnerabilities. The post-2015 development framework must fulfil our aspirations for building an equitable, prosperous and sustainable world where no person or nation is left behind. It must also contribute to a strengthened multilateralism, go beyond the national policy space and forge international cooperation. Greater resources would be key to the success of the post-2015 agenda. There is a need for a robust and broad-based global partnership based on the principles of mutual trust, respect and common but differentiated responsibilities. Bangladesh underscores its clear resolve with regard to the financing of sustainable development by next year, in particular from the financing for development process. While it is encouraging that some developed countries have fulfilled their commitment to contributing 0.7 per cent of their gross national income (GNI) and 0.2 per cent of GNI as official development assistance (ODA) to the least developed countries (LDCs), most other countries have yet to fulfil those goals. At the same time, in a globalized economy, the least developed and most climate-vulnerable countries, such as Bangladesh, require greater support in terms of ODA, science and technology innovation and capacity- building. All products from all LDCs must be granted duty- and quota-free access to all markets of developed countries. The world today is witnessing unprecedented human mobility within and beyond borders. Bangladesh has emerged as a key stakeholder in global migration. For instance, remittances contribute approximately 14 per cent of our GDP. Millions of our migrant workers continue to make a significant contribution to development in a range of countries worldwide. We need to acknowledge the manifold contributions that migrants and their families make to our economies and societies apart from just remittances. It is therefore logical for migration and development issues to find a well-deserved space across the emerging post- 2015 framework. It is my pleasure to announce that Bangladesh will chair the ninth Global Forum on Migration and Development in 2016. No challenge is as complex, widespread and formidable as climate change, in particular for countries such as ours. A recent Asian Development Bank report estimated that the mean economic cost of climate change and adaptation for Bangladesh would be between 2 and 9 per cent of GDP by 2100. Earlier, I emphasized before the Assembly that an increase of 1°C in the temperature is estimated to lead to a 1-metre rise in the sea level, thereby submerging a fifth of the territory of Bangladesh. That could compel 30 million of our people to move elsewhere as climate migrants. For Bangladesh, climate change is a matter of bare survival. In addressing climate change, adaptation remains particularly key for us. We have a crucial need for adequate, predictable and additional climate financing, access to locally adaptable technologies and support for capacity- and institution-building. We reiterate, under United Nations leadership, in particular through the role of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the importance of the processes for the integration of the UNFCCC, disaster- risk reduction and the sustainable development goals. The world also needs to recognize the untapped potential of an ocean-based blue economy. The coastal and small island developing States stand to greatly benefit from the balanced conservation, development and use of marine ecosystems, resources and services. We call for global support for coastal countries, such as Bangladesh, in developing the much-needed capacity, technology and institutional frameworks that will enable us to tap into blue opportunities. For that reason, we continue to support the inclusion of blue-economy principles and practices in the post-2015 framework. Bangladesh proposed a flagship resolution at UNESCO, adopted in 1999, which led to the recognition of 21 February as the International Mother Language Day for the peoples of the world. We established the only International Mother Language Institute in Dhaka to preserve the more than 6,500 mother tongues of humankind. Those are two pillars of our commitment to mother languages. I once again call on the Assembly to recognize Bangla, which is spoken by more than 300 million people, as an official language of the United Nations. This year, Bangladesh celebrates 40 years of its membership of the United Nations. On this special occasion, I should like to reaffirm, on behalf of our people, the appeal by the father of our nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, for our progeny at this Assembly in 1974: Let us together create a world that can eradicate poverty, hunger, war and human suffering and achieve global peace and security for the well-being of humankind.