Rome-Ruthenia 12 September 2024 (NRom)
The world is no stranger to health crises. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the persistent threat of diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS, we are reminded all too often that health is a global concern. The Prince-Bishop’s support for the UN proposal highlights a crucial truth: health is not merely a matter of individual nations but a shared responsibility that requires collaboration on a grand scale.
The Church's role in this initiative reflects the moral and ethical obligation that religious leaders hold in advocating for the well-being of humanity. The United Roman-Ruthenian Church stands as a symbol of hope and compassion. By endorsing this UN proposal, the Church underscores its dedication to not only spiritual matters but also the pressing health needs of humanity.
Also, the endorsement comes at a time when the importance of faith-based organizations in public health is increasingly recognized. These organizations often have deep ties to the communities they serve, enabling them to address health disparities more effectively than many traditional governmental or non-governmental entities. The support of the UN initiative signals an acknowledgment of this potential, urging collaboration between faith-based organizations and public health systems to create a more robust response to global health challenges.
The proposal itself is a call for action for nations to come together in solidarity. It emphasizes the need for increased funding for health initiatives, the sharing of knowledge and resources, and the establishment of equitable healthcare systems. Such measures are not merely aspirational; they are necessary to ensure that every person, regardless of their geographical location, has access to the healthcare they need.
The endorsement also sends a message to political leaders around the world: health should not be a partisan issue. The challenges we face are too significant to be overshadowed by political divides. The initiative serves as a reminder that leadership in health must be unified, transcending nationalistic tendencies to foster a sense of global community. In a world where we often feel divided, this message is one of hope and unity. Indeed, it is imperative that the international community takes this endorsement seriously. The global health landscape is in dire need of innovative solutions and collaborative efforts. The Prince-Bishop’s voice adds an important moral dimension to this discussion, reminding us that health is a universal right, not a privilege.
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Complete proposal text:
Complete proposal text:
Summit of the Future
Ensuring the primacy of human rights and effective accountability to
achieve the Sustainable Development Goals
United Nations Headquarters, New York
Sept 22-23, 2024
We the undersigned civil society organizations and experts call on world leaders to redouble efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in the service of people and planet. The Pact for the Future negotiations recognize the need for more work, but reveal little concrete plans to make meaningful achievements.
Full and equitable realization of all human rights can be measured by equitable optimization of healthy life expectancy, which now ranges from national averages of 44 years to 74 years and typically varies domestically, reflecting internal social inequality. Deprivation, poor health and premature death obstruct the enjoyment of material and dignitary human rights and stoke tensions leading to armed conflict. While some improvements in sustainable development have been evident, some indicators have worsened. Conflict, climate change, and COVID-19 have impeded progress, but episodic setbacks pale by comparison to stark, inequitably felt, persisting harms.
Consider the following in future national actions to fully realize the Goals in the remaining six years:
1. Ensure the primacy of the actionable right to health, food, water, shelter, other fundamental human rights, and the collective right development. Of approximately 60 million deaths annually, half are attributable to entirely preventable causes, largely due to poorly regulated commercial products and services and inadequate critical water infrastructure. Prevention is more affordable and humane, but is less immediately politically gratifying and prone to resistance from commercially vested interests. If the right to health (Action 31) had prevailed over the pharmaceutical companies’ contractual and trade-treaty-protected intellectual property rights (Action 32), millions of COVID-19 deaths might have been prevented. COVID-19 led to nearly as many excess deaths per year (7.5 million) from 2020 to 2022 as World War II (10 million). WHO, Harvard School of Public Health, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and Lancet commission experts estimate:
malnutrition in all its forms causes 11 million deaths per year and nearly half of deaths of children under age 5,
tobacco causes 8 million deaths/years,
air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes 8 million deaths/year,
inadequate water supply, sanitation, and hygiene causes 3.5 million deaths/year,
alcohol causes 2.6 million deaths/year,
toxic chemicals and pesticides cause 2 million deaths/year,
suboptimal breastfeeding driven by promotion of breastmilk substitutes causes 823,000 deaths/year.
Six years have passed since the UN Human Rights Council mandated a working group to elevate the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development to the status of a treaty. Ten years have passed since the Council mandated another working group to negotiate a treaty to help ensure that transnational and other businesses respect human rights and at least three more years of negotiations are anticipated. Justiciable, meaningfully enforced rights are foundations of the rule of law. Prioritizing human rights and restoring solidarity in acute and persistent crises commands swift responses. “Progressive” realization of rights cannot come to mean “weak” or “never.”
The UN Secretary General’s Group of Independent Scientists’ 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report concluded that the world is “far off track…Without urgent course correction and acceleration, humanity will face prolonged periods of crisis and uncertainty – triggered by and reinforcing poverty, inequality, hunger, disease, conflict and disaster.” Its 2024 report stated that, still: “On average, only 16 percent of the SDG targets are on track to be met globally by 2030, with the remaining 84 percent showing limited progress or a reversal of progress.”
A rights-based approach requires that legal and regulatory measures needed to achieve SDG should be included among targets and indicators.
2. Adopt a Code-of-Conduct for engaging with civil society as urged by 420 mainly ECOSOC-accredited NGOs calling for conflict-of-interest safeguards, ensuring access to information, a UN lobbying registry, and access to so many UN negotiations secreted from public view. NGOs need more tools to ensure that UN and government institutions are accountable for SDG promises they make in New York and capitals based on the best available evidence. See: http://tinyurl.com/UNConduct These important elements of access to justice are already implemented by many governments, nationally.
3. Specifically mandate relatable consumer warning labels about the SDG impact of commercially traded products and services, especially food, alcohol, tobacco, fossil fuels and the machines they power, the true costs of which equate to half of the global commercial economy (Actions 10, 53 and 54). Of the US$101 trillion global economy, people spend:
$10 trillion on food, including breastmilk substitutes,
$1 trillion on tobacco,
$1 trillion on fossil fuels,
$1.5 trillion on gas/diesel passenger cars, and
more on furnaces, cooking equipment, and other machines powered by fossil fuels.
The harms caused by many of these products more than doubles their market cost to equivalent to half of the global commercial economy, with most of the burden borne by the public sector, including harm to human health, reduced productivity of all industries, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and the largely uncalculated ravages child labour and unlivable wages. For instance:
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that global food systems imposed $12.7 trillion (in 2020 Purchasing Power Parity dollars) in externalized costs, due mainly to poor diet and greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant animals, especially cattle.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that the $7 trillion in “explicit” and “implicit subsidies” for fossil fuels (e.g., responding to pollution and greenhouse gas emissions) is seven-fold higher than market prices.
The WHO estimates the economic costs of tobacco to be US$1.4 trillion.
Experts estimate the costs of alcohol to the drinker and society at approximately US$2.6 trillion.
Consumer product and service labelling should reflect companies’ general legal duty to warn and could help shift purchases toward sustainable options. Measuring and reporting such information in meaningful ways at the point-of-sale should help populations better steer markets toward the SDGs. Likewise, national economic performance should be measured using true cost accounting (Action 54).
We cannot indulge years of private sector resistance, casting doubt on research, quibbling over warning language, or offering to tell the good news, but not the bad news. Much is already known by independent experts about the adverse impact of these products, but it is generally not communicated to consumers and is disputed by louder, misleading messages perpetuated by seller-designed halos. Consumption patterns must change before it is too late to cool the planet without catastrophic consequences and before human ill-health fetters development and squanders public social protection resources, human rights, and workforce productivity more than it already has.
4. Action item 4 (para 20(c)) urges raising Official Development Assistance to 0.7% of Gross National Income, revives a 1969 recommendation of former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s United Nations Commission proposal.
That Commission’s goal would have been almost within reach for OECD countries if it had been pursued a decade earlier when Official Development Assistance was nearly 0.6% of Gross National Income in OECD countries. Instead, it fell by nearly half and remains so low 55 years later, even lower than the notoriously austere Reagan/Thatcher administrations in the United States and United Kingdom and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many high-income countries nearly doubled their national budgets to protect their own citizens, but Official Development Assistance rose only from 0.30% of total OECD GNI in 2019 to 0.37% in 2023, an average rise of US$0.02/capita/day for people living outside high-income countries:
Without meaningful increases in Official Development Assistance and significant debt forgiveness—a legacy of insufficient ODA—realizing the development potential of lower-income countries will be suppressed.
5. Financially support civil society SDG advocacy for on-going and formal annual evaluation and accountability for SDG progress, appointed at arm’s length with security of tenure until 2030. Governments and UN institutions should promote more frequent, independently funded fact-checkers from tenured academics and civil society organizations to report to Parliaments on national and global SDG progress. Reports should be ongoing and formalized at least annually. Waiting for mid-term reviews in 15-year missions to tackle existential crises of our time indulges procrastination and dampens accountability. Truly independent advocacy organizations are often starved for funds and lose their impartiality if they turn to discretionary grants from the private sector or governments that they are duty-bound to hold to account. Governments should commit to provide funding to support the work of a number of independent experts in proportion to their population (e.g., one expert per million population), appointed as officers of Parliament, appointed by courts, or funded by other arm’s length transparent means to enjoy security of tenure until 2030 and selected for demonstrated expertise in the 17 applicable SDGs.
