It is an honour for me to represent Italy before this General Assembly of the United Nations — an honour that is. however, not light like privilege, but heavy like the weight of responsibility.
We are living in complex times of continuous emergencies and change, and we cannot afford the luxury of words of circumstance, of lofty principles that have never been realized and of easy choices in place of the right ones. We need to look back at the profound meaning of what gave life to this place — the community of nations and peoples that are reflected in the 1945 Charter of the United Nations, which was established to find shared solutions that could guarantee peace and prosperity.
There are basically two fundamental premises that give meaning to these halls. On the one hand, there are nations that exist because they reflect humankind’s innate need to feel a sense of belonging to a community and to a certain people and to be able to share with others the same historical memory, the same laws and the same customs and traditions — in a word, one’s identity. On the other hand, there is the aspiration of nations that are different from each other to find a place in which to resolve international disputes through an instrument that may be more difficult to use. but is definitely more effective than resorting to force, that is. the instrument of reason.
If those two premises — the nation and reason — are still the foundation of our action, we must reject the utopic and self-serving narrative of those who say that a world without nations, without borders and without
identity would be a world without war and conflict. Just as fiercely, we must thwart the return to the use of force as a tool to resolve international conflict.
Russia’s war of invasion of Ukraine tells us precisely this — that over those who want to take us back to a world of dominion and neo-imperial wars, which we thought we had done away with in the past century, reason can still prevail and the love of country and the value of the nation can still be safeguarded from the unimaginable. It is up to us. each and every one of us. to decide on what side of history we want to stand in good conscience. But let us not fool ourselves, because this is what is at stake — the choice between nation and chaos and between reason and prevarication.
Italy made a clear choice as to where it stands. It did so out of a sense of justice and because it is aware of how difficult it would be to govern a world in which the upper hand is given to those who bombard civilian infrastructure, hoping to bring a people to its knees with cold and darkness, and to those who weaponize energy and blackmail developing nations, blocking exports of grain — the raw material needed to feed millions of people. The repercussions of the conflict in Ukraine overwhelm us all like a domino effect, but they mainly impact nations of the global South. It is a war waged not only against Ukraine, but against the poorest nations.
Italy’s attention is particularly focused on Africa, where nations already beleaguered by long periods of drought and by the effects of climate change now face a situation compounded by food insecurity, making them more vulnerable to instability and an easier prey for terrorism and fundamentalism.
That is a choice — to create chaos and spread it. Criminal networks that profit from desperation to collect easy billions infiltrate such chaos, which produces tens of millions of people potentially in search of better living conditions. They are traffickers of human beings, who organize the trade of illegal mass immigration. They deceive those who rely on them to migrate to find a better life, having them pay thousands of dollars for trips to Europe that they sell through brochures as if they were normal travel agencies. But those brochures do not say that all too often those trips can lead to death and to a grave at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. because they do not care whether or not the boat used is unfit for that kind of travel. The only important thing for them is the profit margin.
Those are the people who. owing to a certain hypocritical approach to the issue of immigration, have become rich beyond measure. We want to wage battle against the mafia in all its forms, and we will battle against that too. The fact is that the fight against organized crime should be an objective that unites us all. and that also invests the United Nations and this very place.
Can an Organization like this, which reaffirms faith in the dignity and worth of the human person in its founding act. turn a blind eye to such tragedy? Can we really pretend to not see that no other criminal activity in the world today is more lucrative than the trafficking in migrants when it is United Nations reports themselves that have shown how. by volume of money, that business has reached the same level as drug trafficking and has largely surpassed that of arms trafficking?
Can this Assembly of the United Nations, which in other times was fundamental to definitively eradicating the universal crime of slavery, today tolerate its comeback under other guises, that the commercialization of human life continues, that there are women brought to Europe who are forced into prostitution to repay the enormous debt that they incur with their traffickers, or that there are men thrust into the hands of organized crime?
Can we really say that it is solidarity to receive, as a priority, not those who are truly entitled and have a need, but those who can afford to pay the traffickers and to allow those criminals to establish who has the right to be saved and who does not? I do not think so. I believe that it is the duty of this Organization to reject any hypocritical approach to this issue and wage a global war without mercy against traffickers in human beings. To do that, we must work together at every level. Italy plans to be on the front line in that regard.
With the Rome process, launched in July at the International Conference on Migration and Development, we have engaged Mediterranean and various African nations in a process that follows two main paths: on the one hand, defeating the slave traders of the third millennium and. on the other hand, tackling the root causes of migration, with the objective of guaranteeing the primary right, that is. the right not to have to emigrate, not to be forced to leave one’s home and one’s family and to cut off one’s roots, being able to find in one’s own land the conditions to achieve one’s own fulfilment.
Here too. we must have the courage to say it as it is. Africa is not a poor continent. To the contrary, it is rich with strategic resources. It contains half the world’s minerals, including abundant rare earth minerals, and 60 per cent of arable lands, which are often not utilized. Africa is not a poor continent, but it has often been, and still is. an exploited one. Too often the interventions of foreign nations on the continent have not respected local realities. The approach was often predatory, and yet still paternalistic.
We must change course. Italy wants to contribute to the construction of a model of cooperation capable of collaborating with African nations so that they may grow and prosper from the great resources that they possess — a cooperation of equals, because Africa does not need charity, but to be put in a position to compete on an equal footing of strategic investments that can bind our futures together with mutually beneficial projects. In that way we can offer a serious alternative to the phenomenon of mass migration, an alternative that is work, training, opportunities for nations of origin and pathways for legal and agreed migration, and thus integratable.
We will be the first to set a good example through the Mattei Plan for Africa, a development cooperation plan named after Enrico Mattei, a great Italian who knew how to balance Italy’s national interests with the rights of partner States to witness their own moment of development and progress.
The focal point is that we must have the courage to put humankind and human rights back at the centre of our action. It seems like a self-evident principle, but that is now no longer the case. Countries are invaded; wealth is increasingly concentrated; poverty is rampant; and the slave trade is re-emerging. All of that seems poised to put the sacredness of the human being at risk.
Even what would seem, at a superficial glance, a tool that could improve the well-being of humankind, at a closer look can turn out to be a risk. Let us just consider artificial intelligence. The applications of that new technology may offer great opportunities in many fields, but we cannot pretend to not understand its enormous inherent risks. I am not sure if we are adequately aware of the implications of technological development, whose pace is much faster than our capacity to manage its effects. We were used to progress that aimed to optimize human capacities, while today we are dealing with progress that risks replacing human capacities, because, if. in the past, such replacement focused on physical tasks so that humans could dedicate themselves to intellectual and organizational work, today the human intellect risks being replaced, with consequences that could be devastating, particularly for the job market. More and more people will no longer be necessary in a world ever-dominated by disparities and by the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few.
That is not the world that we want. We should therefore not mistake that dominion for a free zone without rules. We need global governance mechanisms that ensure that such technologies respect ethical boundaries and that technological development remains at the service of humankind, and not vice versa. We must guarantee the practical application of the concept of “algorethics”, that is. ethics for algorithms.
Those are some of the major themes on which Italy will focus during its presidency of the Group of Seven in 2024. However, they are mainly issues that are the responsibility of the United Nations. They are enormous challenges that we will not be able to tackle if we do not also acknowledge our limitations as nations and as part of the multilateral system. Italy therefore supports the need for a reform of the Security Council that will make it more representative, transparent and effective — a Council that can ensure a fairer geographical distribution of seats and that can also strengthen regional representation that comes from an order frozen in time, established by the outcomes of a conflict that ended 80 years ago in another century, in another millennium, so that everyone has the opportunity to demonstrate their worth at the present time.
On those and many other issues, we will be tested in our capacities to govern our times and in our ability to do what here in this Assembly Hall, on 2 October 1979. a great man. a saint and a statesman. Pope John Paul II. recalled, that is. that political activity, whether national or international, comes from the human being, is practised by the human being and is meant for the human being.