Violations of UN Charter and international law now ‘facts of life’, Cuban Foreign Minister says
The Foreign Minister of Cuba expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, and highlighted global challenges such as wealth inequality, climate financing and debt relief, in his speech to the UN General Assembly on Saturday.
Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla said the Israeli army has “massacred” over 40,000 civilians in Gaza over the past 11 months. He also paid tribute to the more than 220 UN staff killed in the conflict.
“The genocide against the Palestinian people must end unconditionally and without further delay,” he said.
Addressing the risk of escalation, he said that “Israel, with the complicity of the United States, has brought the world to the brink of a major world conflict”, adding that “the irresponsible aggression against Lebanon, Syria, Iran and the people of the Middle East will have consequences that are hard to predict.”
Mr. Rodríguez Parrilla stated that nearly 80 years after the UN’s establishment, “the continued violations of the United Nations Charter and international law, aggressions, interference in the internal affairs of States, and the imposition of unilateral coercive measures for political purposes, have become facts of life.”
Global peace and security are being undermined by “aggressive expansionist and supremacist military doctrines of domination”.
He said world military expenditure continued to increase for a ninth consecutive year, reaching $2.44 trillion in 2023 – a figure that also includes the development of new nuclear weapons.
He warned that there will be no peace without development, yet “developed countries, which inhabit the very same planet, blindly refuse to invest even minimally in its prosperity and security.”
Furthermore, “the aspiration of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has vanished”, he continued, noting that the collective wealth of the world’s five richest people has increased while five billion globally continue to live in poverty.
“With a tax on the wealth of billionaires, two billion people could be brought out of poverty,” Mr. Rodríguez Parrilla said.
Turning to the climate emergency, he recalled that scientists reported in July that the planet had experienced 13 consecutive months of record high temperatures.
“If irrational and unsustainable production and consumption patterns of capitalism are not changed in an urgent and significant way, it will be impossible to limit the global average temperature increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius in comparison with pre-industrial levels,” he said.
He expressed hope that governments meeting at the UN COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan this November will adopt a new climate financing goal.
Richer countries “will have a new possibility to begin closing the climate finance gap and pay their financing debts”, while developing nations “will have to design a sufficient goal that responds to our own needs, with guarantees for development and social justice.”
He said the solution will inevitably have to include the write-off of foreign debt, “which has already been paid several times over”.
Mr. Rodríguez Parrilla called for a “fair, democratic international order” which, among other points, “guarantees the general good and prosperity of all peoples in harmony with nature, and the sustainable management of natural resources to ensure the exercise of all human rights for all people”.
The Foreign Minister also addressed the United States’s nearly 65-year trade and economic embargo against Cuba, which has caused “visible and undeniable” damage and impacted the daily life of the population.
Meanwhile, the inclusion of the Caribbean Island in a US State Department list of countries that allegedly sponsor terrorism is “a fraudulent designation, void of any international authority or mandate”.
