I speak on behalf of EU and its Member States as well as Candidate Countries North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia, as well as Andorra and San Marino align themselves with this statement.

First, I wish to express my deep thanks to the co-facilitators for your work in bringing together so many contributions into one well prepared zero draft. We are grateful for your diligent efforts in navigating this negotiation process.

The EU and its Member States consider the zero draft a solid starting point to address the numerous global challenges we are facing.

We must use this opportunity to jointly progress on our shared commitment to make the world safer, more rights-respecting, more prosperous, and equitable for all – led through an inclusive, better networked and effective multilateral system with the UN at its core.

As the Secretary General said in his New Year’s speech: “Let’s resolve to make 2024 a year of building trust and hope in all that we can accomplish together.” By harnessing the potential of innovation and forward-thinking, it is a commitment we all have to make for current and future generations and our planet.

We cannot therefore understate the importance of fostering a spirit of collaboration, trust, and compromise among member states as we elaborate this Pact and strive to make it even more ambitious and action-oriented and.

The Summit is of course an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, including delivery on the SDG Summit commitments, and we will seek ways to ensure that references to the processes and mechanisms to do so are further strengthened and precise.

But we must also recognize that the challenges we are facing are only partly either caused by, or resolved through, development. The Pact is neither the place to “regurgitate,” nor the place to “re-litigate,” last year’s SDG Declaration. We are here to address the totality of the very diverse and multi-faceted challenges of today’s world.

This means we must ensure a balanced approach towards the three pillars of the UN - fostering peace and security, boosting sustainable development, and safeguarding human rights. They are intertwined, interconnected, and together can make or break the world we build for ourselves and our children. These mutually reinforcing objectives need to therefore be equally reflected in the Pact.

Our common compass must be our collective support for internal law and for a rules-based international system rooted in the UN. We must, at a minimum, unequivocally reaffirm this institution’s foundational basics – which include the purposes and principles of the UN Charter as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and existing obligations under international human rights law. From a cross-cutting perspective, we recall that UN Member States have agreed to take into account the realization of human rights of all, the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the chapters of the Pact.

Distinguished colleagues, we also need to raise our level of ambition. While the zero drafts builds on past successes and puts accents on ongoing processes, which we should avoid overlap and duplications with, we want to see a more forward-looking and aspirational text, with tangible outcomes especially with regards to our global governance and the effective utilisation of all available means of implementation.

Let me highlight some important points that we would like to see strengthened in the text:

1. Achieving sustainable development is a big part of the challenges we face and the 2030 Agenda remains our collective roadmap to addressing these. We need to emphasize that upholding human rights and the centrality of human dignity, as well as the role of women and girls as agents of change for sustainable development, is crucial to achieving our objectives and to expediting progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. But we also need to address emerging challenges and embark on opportunities related to science, new technologies and innovation, as well as climate change. The UN Development Reform is crucial to ensure that the system is fit for purpose.

2. On peace and security, we welcome the focus on conflict prevention and peace operations, the references to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and the call to intensify efforts on Climate, Peace and Security. At the same time, some key areas are missing, specifically some more ambitious proposals for actions. For example, on conflict prevention, the national level is not mentioned and more broadly, the global strategic context should be further taken into account.

3. On the science, technology and innovation chapter, we welcome the emphasis on gender equality and science- and evidence-based policymaking. However, this chapter needs more balancing. We need to shift the current almost exclusive focus on sustainable development towards highlighting the positive opportunities as well as addressing emerging challenges of STIs and digital technologies, including for gender equality, human rights, but also for education, health, decent work, environment/climate, food security, and social justice and cohesion, among others. The Pact should also be more ambitious and goal-oriented on deepening global scientific and innovation cooperation. Furthermore, it would be worth recalling the importance of a multi-stakeholder and inclusive cooperation, as well as the development of technologies respectful of human rights.

4. The global governance reform chapter could be more concrete and provide a view of what the key principles and actions should be. Furthermore, the draft needs to be strengthened notably with regards to our global commons, whilst also better respecting appropriate mandates and responsibilities. We need a stronger sense of urgency, vision and priority to the existential impact of the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Focus should be to strengthen language in this regard, address environmental governance, including climate and biodiversity financing, transition to a circular economy, and better interagency cooperation. Emphasizing disaster risk reduction as well as the role of culture is also important. This chapter could further include a stronger reference to the 2030 Agenda. Finally, we also have to look more closely at the language on international financial architecture reform.

5. Finally, we see the Chapeau as the summary of the entire text and the part that will be most accessible to the public. It should lay out our collective ambitions for the future and can be used as a standalone statement by world leaders. This should therefore be discussed towards the end of the negotiation process.

And in all areas, greater emphasis should be given to the inclusion of various stakeholders and civil society in the text, accompanied by concrete reforms to strengthen their participation. They will, after all, play a daily part in implementing our conclusions on the ground.

Dear friends, in the negotiations, there is a necessity of striking a balance between inclusivity and effectiveness. We continue to encourage engagement from all stakeholders in this process to ensure ownership by all and, therefore, achieve meaningful outcomes.

And to all the colleagues here, let me just restate the EU’s full support to this process. We, the EU and its Member States, commit to working with all of you constructively and in a transparent manner, towards achieving an ambitious, forward-looking, and action-oriented Pact for the Future. Thank you.