New York — Former Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has challenged world leaders on the United Nations Common Meeting’s eightieth anniversary Excessive-Degree Plenary on Peace and Safety to “transfer past phrases” and recommit to the ideas of the UN Constitution amid deepening international crises.
By Gerald C. Koinyeneh, [email protected]
Addressing presidents, diplomats, and UN officers, Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected feminine head of state, mirrored on the UN’s legacy whereas warning that its credibility is at stake.
“Eighty years after the founding, we should recommit to the Constitution, to our frequent safety; to the idea that nations can select dialogue over destruction,” she declared.
She highlighted Africa as each a check case and a beacon of resilience: regardless of battle stretching from Sudan to the Sahel and the Nice Lakes, native communities, regional our bodies, and ladies’s teams proceed to push again in opposition to extremist violence and negotiate peace the place governments typically fail.
Drawing on Liberia’s post-war expertise, Sirleaf praised the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission—which helped disarm fighters, reform safety establishments, and restore belief in governance—as proof that “prevention prices lower than reconstruction” and that peace is just sustainable when linked to justice, jobs, and dignity.
However she didn’t draw back from criticizing the failures of world governance. From Gaza to Ukraine, she mentioned, civilians—particularly girls and kids—pay the very best worth as energy rivalries and vetoes within the Safety Council paralyze significant motion.
“Have international constructions and leaders failed us? Why are they so silent; content material to see girls and kids endure from acts of inhumanity?” Sirleaf requested. “Commemoration with out candor is unaffordable.”
She urged the UN and member states to design a brand new imaginative and prescient of collective safety underneath the theme “Higher Collectively”—a technique that features financing prevention efforts, making certain girls’s full participation in peace processes, defending civilians, regulating the knowledge house, and tackling the “triple planetary disaster” of local weather change, biodiversity loss, and air pollution.
“Peace is constructed not solely in convention rooms however in school rooms the place ladies be taught with out concern; clinics the place moms ship safely; markets the place youth discover dignified work; courts the place regulation is truthful; and in every day acts of neighborly coexistence,” she mentioned.
Closing her remarks, Sirleaf issued a rallying name: “Allow us to depart this anniversary with concrete commitments, funded priorities, and a timetable for motion… that the United Nations, because it celebrates its eightieth yr, stays a spot of peace, refuge, solace, unity, and hope.”
