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‘Will focus on vaccines for all by end of 2022’: UNGA president-elect Abdulla Shahid
President-elect of the UN General Assembly Abdulla Shahid, who is also the Maldives’ foreign minister, said on Friday he will endeavour to bring together Covid-19 vaccine producers and countries to ensure people around the world are vaccinated by the end of 2022
President-elect of the UN General Assembly Abdulla Shahid, who is also the Maldives’ foreign minister, said on Friday he will endeavour to bring together Covid-19 vaccine producers and countries to ensure people around the world are vaccinated by the end of 2022.
Shahid also emphasised that the UN has a “very clear role” in the situation in Afghanistan and the world community has to unite to assist the peace process in the troubled country. He made the remarks while participating in an interactive session after delivering the annual Sapru House Lecture on the theme “Covid pandemic and need for reformed multilateralism”.
Currently on a three-day visit to India to outline the priorities for his tenure as president of the UN General Assembly, Shahid has already come out with a five-point plan that includes reforming the UN and post-pandemic recovery.
Talking about his plans to bring together Covid-19 vaccine producers, distributors and countries, he said, “I think this is not a time to [do] finger-pointing, I think this is a time to share, take stock and chart a future course of action. We need to get everyone vaccinated in the world by the end of 2022, at the latest, if we are serious about confronting this pandemic.”
Responding to a question on the situation in Afghanistan amid the drawdown of US and NATO forces and an intense campaign by the Taliban to capture territory, Shahid said, “The maintenance of international peace and security is mandated to the Security Council and therefore the UN has a very clear role in what is happening in Afghanistan.
Describing the Afghan people as resilient and their leadership as strong, he added, “Their government is a democratic government elected by the people... I think we all, the international community, need to come together and assist the Afghan people in whatever way they so desire so that they could have the way forward that is being charted out by their government and people.”
Shahid also spoke of his plans to push forward the process for the UN to adopt a comprehensive convention on terrorism, saying, “Terrorism is a scourge, it has no religion, it has no borders, it has no soul, it is pure evil.”
He added that unethical and inhuman beliefs are what result in the promotion of terrorism. “What we require now is for the political leadership of the world to come together. The best message we could send to terrorists now is to come up with the comprehensive convention on terrorism.”
Backing India’s long-standing bid for permanent membership of the UN Security Council, he said the Maldives was among 10 countries that had sought reforms of this key body as far back as the 1970s. “To say that it is taking a long time is an understatement because perhaps when this letter was signed by the Maldives and submitted, I was only 10 years old,” he said.
Contemporary political realities aren’t reflected in the membership of the Security Council and the entire membership of the UN now agrees on the need for institutional reforms, including the inclusion of new permanent members in the council, he said.
In his speech, Shahid said the world now has a clearer picture of how quickly the production of vaccines can be scaled up and their effectiveness. “But it is not something to celebrate. We now know that the world’s economy shrank by 4.3% in 2020, wiping out trillions of dollars,” he said.
“We know that countries have fallen further into debt. For the first time in 20 years, global poverty is likely to increase significantly, 114 million people lost their jobs in 2020, while many have had their working hours or pays cut, or fallen into economic inactivity – meaning they had to withdraw from the labour force,” he added.
Shahid said this is why he chose hope as the central theme of his presidency of the UN General Assembly. “My immediate priority will be recovering from Covid-19. The impacts have been immense, and yet still, this pandemic seems to be far from over,” he said.
“New variants are emerging. And we are still unclear about the longer-term health consequences. The United Nations can, and must do more to address this,” he said.
