Statement by President Michael D. Higgins for World Humanitarian Day 2024

Statement by President Michael D. Higgins for World Humanitarian Day 2024

Date: Mon 19th Aug, 2024 | 17:18

"Issuing a statement for World Humanitarian Day in 2024 is extremely challenging. In almost every aspect of our shared lives, there is less and less space for a discussion as to how we might reduce what are ever-increasing humanitarian disasters.

It is as if the world has become desensitised by the daily loss of life, so much of it avoidable, that it has descended into a passivity which includes an ever-decreasing respect for International Law. Indeed, the prospects as to whether International Law can survive, and any of the institutions associated with it, means that the forthcoming United Nations meeting in New York is by any standard a crisis meeting.

The domination in the discourse, both internationally and regionally, by the politics of fear and by the definition of power as capacity to access weapons of destruction is another indication of the crisis we face.

How well this was put in a recent piece commenting on our present position by the poet Hala Alyan, where she spoke of how:

We must not believe for a second that relentless dehumanization is only the problem of the dehumanized. They pay the unimaginable cost, but it is a multidirectional phenomenon. What oppressive systems don't realize is that to engage in dehumanization - in thought, in speech, in action, in policy - is a slow and isolating exercise in the siphoning of your own humanity."

However difficult, we must all remain positive and seek to encourage hope. There are great projects that deserve global support. Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, speaking for peace, and responding to climate change must continue to engage all our efforts, they are after all our main sources of hope.

So also is the recently launched global campaign to end hunger and poverty by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

We cannot continue to ignore the debt burden hanging around the necks of the poorest in the world. They have no fiscal space to do any of the things being sought of them. Norwegian Church Aid has recently reported that servicing of debt exceeds total social spending (that is spending on health, education and social protection combined) in 33 countries. The report further finds that debt servicing exceeds education spending in 104 countries, health spending in 116 countries, and social protection spending in 107 countries.

Overcoming these crises, and building a world based on humanitarian values, is a task which must now be addressed with the utmost urgency by all countries and by all of our international institutions."

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