7th Asia-Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights
Opening Session – Special Remarks
Manila, Philippines
22 January 2014

Thank you Secretary of Health Enrique Ona for your leadership, commitment and vision.  What you sir, and the Government of the Philippines have achieved in the form of the new reproductive health law, which we trust will soon be released from the Supreme Court process, is just inspirational.

The United Nations Population Fund – and on behalf of our Executive Director - is honored to participate in opening of this great regional gathering and we bring you warm greetings of appreciation from the international community of donors, civil society and the UN family at large.  Today, building on the leadership of yesterday’s young peoples’ forum, we take up this great opportunity to examine together how best to advance SRH and the associated human rights for all.

It is thus also a great honor to share this space with you - people of such stature, of such commitment who represent the many sectors that are key to development’s proper advance and who in doing so are also key leaders for sexual reproductive health and rights.  

I want to take the opportunity to single out the incomparable Nafis Sadik.  Her leadership for human rights and her vision of an inclusive development that leaves no one behind is something you will experience in a few minutes time but from which we have all been benefiting over decades.  It is a privilege Dr Sadik to be with you in your home region, humbling for those of us who inherent the legacy of your leadership of UNFPA and inspiring to see your continued stewardship in support of what the world now knows as the Cairo Programme of Action.  We surely stand on your shoulders.

The heralding, crafting, and drafting of the world changing, ground shifting and frontier-riding ICPD whose implementation began 20 years ago, had no possibilities for success or prospects for enduring impact without its greatest champions which are civil society actors.  So many heroines and heros of civil society, and their organizations and networks, must be celebrated for their constancy in advocacy including specifically from this region.  And in this light, none more so than Professor Gita Sen who will also address us later today and who surely embodies the courageous tenacity of human rights defenders who have stood up – often in the most difficult of circumstances – to insist that governments uphold and abide by the aspirations of the ICPD.  She is a true daughter and sister of the AP region.

These voices that have been with us over the years of the ICPD protecting and asserting its span and reach – standing up for and insisting on and pushing for SRH and their associated human rights, also have their natural successors. 

Two decades on new faces, new voices and new understandings are moving into focus, freshly owning the Cairo agenda, giving it contemporary currency and demonstrating its enduring relevance.  In this regard, I want to start where we must end, and that is with young people. 

Just yesterday young people claimed their space to speak first and foremost – to deal together on the matters, which the remainder of the conference is now to address.  Their forum brought together hundreds of youth leaders from across the region, and their vision, expertise and commitment shaped a clear and clarion demand that their rights be upheld – a demand which those of us who are not so young would resist at their and our peril.  The leadership and advocacy of adolescents and youth is inverting the public power paradigm – revealing to the rest of us that their active engagement and direct representation in public decision making is the most promising natural resource for the world’s future development.

It would be a special moment to be in the Philippines for this purpose at any time.  It is made even more so by the fact that we are here for a regional gathering.  However, the poignancy of the occasion is particularly rich and real given the high price paid by the people of the Philippines under force of the Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda.  The extraordinary human stories of resilience, courage and determination that characterize the disaster response led by the Government of the Philippines and made material by the people of the Typhoon affected areas is extraordinary.  UNFPA as part of the overall UN family partnership with the Government of the Philippines is proud to have played its part in ensuring that SRH have been integrated into this powerful humanitarian response.

This natural disaster - unprecedented in scale, monstrous, as the Secretary has said,  in consequence is but a most recent example of why our shared labour to realize the aspirations of the ICPD remains so relevant and why its greatest potential for good lies ahead of us – not behind us.  

Uncertainty, rapid onset change and irreversible adjustments to the patterns of daily lives are likely our close companions in the coming decades.  Across the most critical dimensions of the human story – dimensions such as climate events, economy and technology, urbanization and migration, conflict and consumption and in government and governance, it is clear that we are moving today into a period of human history tomorrow in which the greatest certainty is uncertainty and the one constant is change.  

The greatest challenge - as we move into this next phase of human history - is how best to ensure that these decades to come lead the way to more resilient, inclusive and sustainable development. 

Our conference here this week will examine of critical aspects what needs to be done to ensure that these years ahead of us are renowned for being more fair, more inclusive, less divisive, bearing fruits more universally enjoyed.  And indeed in these discussions today and during the rest of this week, we will be joining and echoing an elaborate policy conversation that has been going on for some 2 years now – involving all member states of the UN and countless meetings and conference.  And that is the Post-2015 process: a process designed to enable member states to arrive at solid agreement about global and sustainable development goals from 2016 onwards, the successors to the MDGS. 

Millions of hours, miles and dollars are being spent to generate warm discussion about the various and often-competing priorities for the world beyond 2015.   But it is strange, if not bizarre, to admit that we already had the answers.  The Cairo Plan of Action.  Please don’t tell anyone that I mentioned this to you, but just between you and I, frankly, the Post-2015 exercise was more or less completed 20 years ago. 

Almost without exception – the chapters of 1994’s ICPD addressed yesterday exactly that with which we grapple today as we seek agreement on our aspirations for tomorrow.  

I can speak with some confidence about this because UNFPA has been just finished its work on the summary of the findings of the operational review of 20 years of the ICPD.  Involving three global conferences on young people, human rights and women’s health, five regional conferences and a global survey to which more than 160 countries and territories have contributed, we now have the very latest data on ICPD implementation and the latest soundings from government and civil society and academia about its relevance.  The findings confirm the validity of the ICPD vision, evidence the continued relevance of the programme of action, demonstrate the healing and ameliorative effect of its actions when implements and underscore the urgent need for its priorities to be realized. 

The 20 year operational review also demonstrates how much further we have to go of course and thus we now have current data as to why its call for human rights centered development, whose heartbeat is SRH and well being, continues to be the most authoritative account of what the world needs to do if it is be sustained in the face of the changes and challenges it faces.

The ICPD is as relevant today as it was in 1994 and I can assure of that with some authority – because Member States at the 6th Asia Pacific Population Conference, held in September last year, gave a near unanimous declaration, under benefiting of passionate leadership from the Pacific, that this the ICPD remains true, pertinent and urgent for this region.  

In so doing, countries across the Asia Pacific region pointed out that their significant strides in their social and economic development since 1994.  But then acknowledged that growth has not been equal across or even within countries and admitted that it has not led to adequate investments in health, particularly not in the field of sexual and reproductive health.

Significant and thus, unsustainable, inequalities persist across this diverse region: Despite advances, thousands of people still live in poverty with economic inequalities wider than ever within and not only between countries.  Thousands pass each day under the caustic cloud of bigotry - paying with other option the high personal price for the prejudices of others.

These costs of these inequalities simply underscore their profound immorality and reveal how inequality undermines enduring development.  Across gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, indigenity, age and other stratifying identities, inequality and the associated ignorance of hatefulness, extract a high price that is paid in currencies that we can ill afford: at cost to social cohesion, to public health, to human rights and thus to hope.  
For progress to be won in reducing and addressing inequalities, the region must once more to its population trajectory, delve again into the deep roots that human rights have in the best of its cultural and religious norms and traditions, and renew more firmly and with a broader base of conviction its pledge to uphold the dignity and rights of each and every person with its boundaries.

As we talked about at yesterday’s youth forum, the period within which the new set of global development goals will take effect begins with at a period unique in our planet’s history – a time when there are more young people on our planet than ever before. 

By the end of that next development period - much closer to the middle of this century, our planet will then house the largest ever number of older people. 

And in-between time, more people will be on the move within and across national borders than ever before, while, for the first time in history, more people will have left rural areas to live in urban and peri-urban spaces. 
So the era ahead is one of great demographic transition.  Only if we engage directly, empower effectively and enable more comprehensively those who today are adolescents, will the next few decades – pave the way to more resilient, inclusive and sustainable development.  This age-transition which will be the hallmark of the coming development era, puts age as the central development identity. 

And yet, across the Asia Pacific region – it is young people living in the circumstances of the gravest inequalities, in the greatest poverty, with the least opportunity to exercise personal autonomy over their bodies and their selves - who have the highest needs because they have the least access to human rights:

• Each year across this region thousands of such girls are subjected to marriage as children, with South Asia having the highest levels of child marriage of any region in the world.
• 6 million adolescent pregnancies occur annually in the Asia Pacific region – 90% inside marriage or union and while the absolute numbers decreased in this century’s first decade, this is no longer the case.  And yet in many places, their access to services is impeded by age restrictions, judgmental service providers and disregard for their right to information.
• Of all unsafe abortions in the Asia Pacific, 34 per cent occur to young women under the age of 25, with an estimated 3.6 million unsafe abortions taking place each year.  Critically and tragically, young women account for a far higher percentage of all unsafe abortions than of pregnancies overall.
• There are 590,000 young people living with HIV in the region. Adolescents are the only age group in which AIDS-related deaths have increased and 95 per cent of new infections in young people are among those from key populations which have higher prevalence: young men having sex with men, transgender young people, young people engaged in sex work and young people who inject drugs.  And the rates of infection are worst for young women.

Most bluntly, tomorrow is today aged ten and it is a girl.  If we change that girl’s journey, we change all those around her and thus we change the world.

But rights violated, rights denied and rights derailed are undermining development.  And it is the behaviors, ideologies and baseless fears of adults – our prurience and moral discomforts - our amnesia – that combine to drive and entrench the human suffering that young people undergo.

Adult denial of emergent adolescence sexuality clouds our ability to engage constructively and act rationally with this critical period in human development - the period during which a person become themselves – in which we became ourselves – sexual, gendered, talented, personalized, individualized - selves – as indeed we all did, in all our diversity.  Perversely, exploitation and abuse by adults of that same emerging sexual identity is the untold story accounting for most of child marriage, sexual violence and human trafficking.

Plato is credited with observing millennia ago that “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”  Why is that older people are so afraid of the light that we owe to young people.  The lights of reason, compassion and justice must be turned full glare on the lived reality of the adolescent and adults just have to grow up in order to do so.   

And – here is some news just in – you are never oppressed nor ever diminished just because someone else exercises the rights that you already have.

Investment in realization of young people human rights is the key to unlocking inequalities, eradicating poverty and it is essential for the hardwiring of justice and inclusion into our communities.   Investing in young people is the “rights” thing to do but no development formula or economic advancement strategy can afford to ignore this either. 

This is why UNFPA is calling for a youth goal to be part of the Post-2015 development agenda.  A goal that would commit governments to investments in quality school and post school education; to comprehensive sexuality education; to training linked to expanding sectors; in youth-centered sexual and reproductive health services and information; to youth entrepreneurship; to investment in better data gathering and understanding adolescents lived experience and promotion of young people’s active participation and leadership in the design and evaluation of programs for which they are the intended beneficiaries – these are the fuel rods for sustainable inclusive economic growth across the region. 

As the region us home to the largest share of the world’s population, and more than one half of the world’s young people - those who are just now entering into their reproductive lives - Asia Pacific should be leading the calls for comprehensive implementation of the ICPD. 

So many words that are spoken about SRHR are words of hate and of cruelty.  Words that seed bigotry, fertilize fear and irrigate irrational insecurities.

But because of and through you, and thanks to your leadership - there are today much louder and different words – words that are the parents of tolerance, acceptance and respect.  Words that sculpt personal intimacies into places that are safe; that describe relationships that dignify; words that democratize the body with real choices for the self; words that set out and define laws that protect.  These loud words manifest our higher selves and celebrate our diversity and honor our commonality – they are rainbow words – words that build nations, eliminate inequalities and sustain inclusive economies.  And they are the words of human rights - human rights inclusive of sexual and reproductive health rights.  These are words for everyone of us to the exclusion of none of us, so that each and all of us might live and love in the dignity which is ours simply by virtue of our common humanity.

Thank you.