РУССКИЙ
9:16 27.09.2024 •
Photo: MFA
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting on the sidelines of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, New York, September 25, 2024:
“Mr Chair,
Colleagues,
We would like to thank the Brazilian chairmanship for organising the meeting on topical global matters in New York.
The formation of a multilateral world requires upgrading of the international governance architecture, if we want to build a more just and democratic world order based on the enduring principles of the UN Charter in their entirety and interconnection.
G20, as a leading economic forum, can give a powerful boost to these objective processes that are dictated by life itself. We believe that the G20 should strictly adhere to its mandate and not delve into issues of peace and security and other universal problems, which the UN is here to deal with. It is important that the activities of our platform are strictly based on the principle of consensus.
At the G20 summit in New Delhi in 2023, we promised to strengthen the voice of developing countries in collective decision-making. It is necessary to translate these promises into concrete actions. The reform of international institutions, which must be considered as global public goods, should be carried out taking into account the interests of new growing centres of global development. The current conditions show that there have been significant changes in the balance of economic leaders.
Two years ago, BRICS member countries surpassed the G7 in terms of real GDP. According to forecasts, the ten BRICS members will produce about 37 percent of the world’s output, while the G7 group will fall to 27 percent or even lower.
At the same time, we can see the African continent and other regions of the Global South and East quickly rising. Russia is actively reorienting its trade to their markets. This includes the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Innovative multilateral formats such as BRICS (where Russia presides in 2024), the SCO, the EAEU, ASEAN, the African Union, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) are becoming increasingly important.
Projects designed to align integration efforts, such as Russia’s flagship Greater Eurasian Partnership initiative, are picking up momentum. It proved possible to induce the G20 to prioritise the interests of developing economies. The crucial role in this sense was played by a series of presidencies of countries with emerging markets, namely Indonesia, India, and Brazil. We are confident that this trend will persist during the impending presidency of South Africa.
We were happy to welcome the African Union’s accession to G20. We also support the Arab League’s intent to join its operations. I would like to suggest that we think about creating a specialised track for cooperation between regional platforms within G20.
A tangible progress has been achieved in the context of efforts to de-dollarise the international financial and economic system. In particular, the share of national currencies in Russia’s settlements with the SCO and EAEU countries has exceeded 90 percent. Russia and its BRICS partners have achieved an indicator equal to 65 percent, and this figure grows. The share of the dollar in the BRICS payments pattern is currently below 29 percent. For our part, we are promoting the idea that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation would do well to launch an independent payments mechanism of its own. Another promising option under consideration is a unified platform for payments in BRICS national digital currencies.
Nevertheless, certain global mechanisms are still in the West’s hands, and it tends to abuse them. A matter of particular concern are the attempts on the part of the United States and its allies to impose a confrontational agenda on international organisations in order to make them the vehicles of unilateral restrictions, plunder, impoundment of sovereign assets, trade wars and unfair competition, including in the name of environmentalism and climate.
All of these are clear manifestations of neocolonialism. Over the past ten years, the collective West has introduced more than 21,000 illegal restrictions against Russia alone. Their extraterritorial use – and this is an even more odious, illegitimate, raider-style approach – is primarily affecting the poorest countries and destitute population groups, depriving them of affordable energy, food and fertiliser.
We are in favour of developing economies being given a share of IMF and World Bank votes commensurate with their international importance. Not a single IMF shareholder, including the United States, should be able to block collective decisions.
The Western monopoly itself on defining the Bretton-Woods institutions’ scale of priorities is unacceptable. This leads to a spillover of funds into military ventures in prejudice of assistance to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and international development as a whole.
It is also necessary to make sure that donor countries fulfil their obligations stipulating the allocation of 0.7 percent of their GDP for facilitating development. This obligation was first assumed 50 years ago and has not been met to date. Donor countries should also allocate the promised $100 billion for financing climate actions. Nothing has been accomplished in this field. International institutions and the West are focusing all their attention and resources on Ukraine.
We also need to resume full-fledged activities of the World Trade Organisation as soon as possible. Today, these activities have been thwarted by a destructive policy of the United States preventing the resumption of the WTO’s body for settling disputes that has remained idle for many years.
Another topical task is combat the predominance and influence of Western states’ citizens who occupy top positions in international secretariats, as well as the excessive involvement of a priori biased NGOs in the intergovernmental process.
A reform of the global governance system should heed the intransient central role of the UN in the system of international relations. The UN Charter and international law should not be substituted by any behind-the-scenes rules. The deleterious nature of covert methods and the need to revive the truly interstate essence of the World Organisation have become particularly obvious as we assess the situation around the Pact for the Future. The future of our nations cannot be invented inside a test-tube, with the involvement of the UN Secretariat and Western lobbyists. It is important to formulate the relevant decision during talks, while striving to attain a balance of interests.
I would like to recall that not a single round of talks involving all delegations took place when the Pact for the Future was drafted. This is something unprecedented, all the more so as we had agreed two years ago to approve it by consensus. However, this did not work, due to the above-mentioned experiments. It is hardly surprising that the G20 appeal passed on the initiative of Brazil merely notes this pact because it deserves nothing more.
I would like to touch upon a section on invigorating the General Assembly. The section states expressly that it is necessary to strengthen the role of the UN General Assembly as the chief deliberative, policymaking and representative organ of the United Nations Organisation. Those who wrote this improvised Pact for the Future somewhere on the sidelines do not want the UN General Assembly to be a deliberative body.
Sadly, the Pact for the Future has simply ignored the esteemed G20 and its position on the need to make the UN General Assembly a truly popular forum stipulating a discussion with the approval of decisions on a universal basis.
Actions to ensure the sovereign equality of all states should become a key vector of our reform efforts. Our colleague from Mexico has just discussed this. This is the main provision of the UN Charter stating expressly that “the Organisation is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” As I have already said, it is also based on a search for a balance of their interests and mutual benefits.
We should be guided by a striving to achieve genuine multilateralism, the main guarantee of strategic stability, indivisible security and an open and non-discriminatory economy.”
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