Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley
Statement by Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, at the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly
New York, 24 September 2026
Mr. President,
Excellencies,
My friends,
We meet at a time when the obstacles confronting human progress are multiplying.
Obstacles to peace, obstacles to food and clean water, obstacles to finance, medicine and education, obstacles to movement and opportunity, obstacles to technology, to the knowledge and infrastructure needed to use it.
And increasingly, obstacles between nations, between communities and between people who no longer agree on the same facts or trust the same institutions.
War continues to destroy lives and communities even though the international community possesses more tools than ever before to prevent conflict and to facilitate dialogue.
The climate crisis is accelerating, even though the science is clear enough for us to act and many of the solutions are already known.
And despite unprecedented global wealth, millions remain without reliable access to food, water, health, or shelter.
These challenges, my friends, are creating the polycrises of which we constantly speak.
And at the same time, new challenges are emerging.
Artificial intelligence is opening extraordinary possibilities in health, education, science and productivity, while also creating new risks of exclusion, exploitation, surveillance and the distortion of truth.
And yet the cooperation needed to confront these challenges is under strain.
It is why I believe the theme this year is so apt: “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.”
The theme reminds us that we have institutions created to preserve peace, to advance development and, yes, to protect human dignity.
The institutions are these very United Nations.
We have shared principles grounded in sovereign equality and in the recognition that our responsibilities extend beyond borders.
The reality is that we understand enough for us to be able to invest in prevention rather than waiting to finance reconstruction.
We understand enough about the climate crisis to reduce the emissions that are warming our planet and take the necessary steps for our populations to adapt.
We equally now understand enough about the rapid development of AI to know that, as we welcome its promise, we must anchor its development in a universal humanizing framework that does not imperil our existence as human beings.
The failure, my friends, to address these challenges, therefore, is not one simply of knowledge or capacity.
It is our repeated failure to convert what we know into what we do, to turn principle into practice and global capacity into solidarity.
So beneath our many crises lies yet another one.
And yes, it is a crisis of responsibility.
Mr. President,
That responsibility begins here in these halls.
The transformation we seek for a better world will only happen when we trust each other, and we accept our responsibility for each other.
We in the Caribbean understand something about the necessity of living together.
We had no choice.
Barbadian novelist and essayist George Lamming once described the Caribbean as perhaps the first global experiment in human history, bringing together, and I quote, “every branch of the human family,” from the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the diverse peoples from Africa, Europe and Asia.
It is as though we, through this torturous and shared history of migration, conquest, slavery and the difficult work of constructing a common national and regional destiny, give the world an example to follow.
Against all the odds, the Caribbean produced what Lamming called a new kind of global family.
Our history has taught us that difference need not mean division, that coexistence requires dialogue and negotiation, and that those without the power to compel must learn the power of persuasion.
These are not merely Caribbean lessons.
They’re universal.
And it is in this spirit I’d like to thank Her Excellency Annalena Baerbock for her leadership of the General Assembly’s 80th Session and for helping to advance the work of the Member States on UN reform.
And to you, Mr. President, Barbados extends its warm congratulations.
We look forward to your stewardship of this Assembly as we move to restore trust and indeed to carry reforms from proposals to implementation.
But reform cannot be selective.
We cannot move swiftly to reorganize offices and reporting lines while allowing the most consequential questions of power and representation to remain unresolved.
Transformation and development, peacekeeping and humanitarian aid cannot succeed if Member States are unwilling to fund them.
Let’s be very clear.
No organizational chart can overcome the refusal of States to respect decisions that they find inconvenient.
We cannot continue to ask international organizations to do more while failing to provide them with the resources necessary to fulfill the mandates that we ourselves have agreed to.
And if Member States believe in the institutions that they have created, then we must also be prepared to sustain them.
Barbados has consistently met that responsibility.
And I assure this body that we will continue to do so.
Our commitment to multilateralism, to an international rules-based order, must be measured not only by what we ask of these institutions, but by our willingness to support them.
So yes, let us improve the machinery.
But let us also reform the exercise of power.
The Security Council still has 15 members, five of them permanent and armed with that veto.
Africa, with 54 States, has no permanent seat.
And you’ve heard speaker after speaker after speaker come to this platform to say that this must change.
Small Island Developing States equally confront threats that now reach squarely into the Council’s mandate, from climate and security and illicit armed flows to organized crime and displacement.
And yet, despite constituting one quarter of the world’s States, we have no assured representation within the Council.
This too, my friends, must change.
And the world we know has already changed.
The Council has not changed with it.
But reform is not only about who sits at the table.
It is about how power is exercised.
Barbados is therefore joining 123 other Member States in supporting the Franco-Mexican initiative on the use of the veto in cases of mass atrocities.
Its principle is fundamental.
Where populations face genocide, crimes against humanity or large-scale war crimes, the veto should not be allowed to paralyze the Security Council when action is most urgently needed.
This is why people are losing trust in the United Nations and its Council.
And, Mr. President, it’s not fair to the majority of Member States who still believe in the promise of this body.
Even as we call for greater equity with the reform of the Security Council, we must equally reform the Secretariat to better support peacekeeping and the resolution of conflicts.
We’ve been told that there are more conflicts today than at any time since the United Nations was established.
And regrettably, these conflicts are in almost every corner of the planet.
The Oslo Peace Institute reported that in 2025, last year, 245,000 individuals faced battle-related deaths.
That is almost Barbados’s population.
I’m told that this makes it the third most violent year in the post-Cold War era.
My friends,
The scale of human tragedy is mounting.
And whether it is in Gaza, or the West Bank, or Lebanon, or Yemen, or Sudan, or Ukraine, or elsewhere, last year we feared that there was a risk of conflicts in the Middle East widening even further.
And the conflicts continue.
These fears regrettably have come to pass, with a global impact.
Indeed, conflicts are more protracted and more fragmented.
And when coupled with hunger and unsustainable debt and a warming planet, it becomes a veritable hell for the citizens of those countries.
Increases in energy and transport costs and in interest rates have spurred inflation.
It means that no one, even on the other side of the world, can escape the hardships in meeting their daily needs.
The truth is, until there is a two-State solution that respects the rights and territories of both the Israelis and Palestinians, we will continue to live on the edge in this world.
And you may well ask, how have we gotten here?
We need to address with laser-like focus every one of these conflicts.
Legitimacy demands that of us.
And let us have the UN deliberately and systematically deploy nimble mediation teams led by political leaders, current and retired, on behalf of the Secretary-General and enjoying the Secretary-General’s confidence and authority and with the respect of Member States.
This, my friends, will help lift the heavy weight necessary to end these multiple conflicts and to bring peace and dignity to those affected populations.
We know that many hands make light work.
And we can’t ignore it.
These conflicts need to be supported by a quicker and technology-enhanced observer force capable of rapid deployment to monitor and support ceasefires and peace agreements.
These peacekeeping forces must be given realistic mandates, predictable financing and true partnership.
Let us work, my friends, together with the parties to these conflicts, to build dialogue and to bring opportunities for investment and jobs to the affected populations so that they too can live properly.
And as for the wider international legal order, we know that countries of every size and capacity depend on a system in which rules are made collectively and applied consistently and fairly.
But if we don’t act early enough, we have trouble.
And that is why we say that the UN must receive the resources and the resolve to act before the guns speak and not after the guns start to fly.
My friends,
Without an equitable rules-based order, smaller States like mine will simply cease to exist in this world.
And that is why Barbados is a co-sponsor of the P4M, a group focused on strengthening multilateralism and beating back the undertakers who are waiting to bury it.
Mr. President,
I would like to express profound appreciation to the Secretary-General, my brother António Guterres.
His voice has been constant, steady and absolutely right on all of the critical issues facing humanity.
And to his Deputy, Amina Mohammed, we also say thank you for taking the journey without deviating from the principles and the core values of this Charter.
As the United Nations undertakes the important task of selecting its next Secretary-General, Barbados joins its sister Member States in the Caribbean Community in pledging its full support for the candidature of Ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana.
At a moment when the international community is being called upon to renew its faith in multilateralism, we believe that Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett brings to this task the experience, the skills and the understanding to serve the entire membership of this Organization.
Indeed, Mr. President, I believe that others think so too.
I’d like, sir, to turn to the topic of artificial intelligence, which is one of our new challenges.
AI is already transforming how we work, learn, and govern.
And it is clear that its potential is extraordinary.
We have found that it has great capacity to detect disease earlier, predict disasters, improve agriculture, and expand access to education and public services.
And yet these same extraordinary systems can just as quickly reproduce discrimination, widen surveillance and spread falsehoods faster than institutions can respond.
We must not allow a new technological age to reproduce old hierarchies of access and power.
And this is why Barbados is so honoured to host the second in-person meeting of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which will be held in November of this year.
We recognize that yesterday’s Security Council encounter may well and should speed up the question of how we, as a global community, deal with this issue.
In the growing age of AI, governance cannot be left to voluntary corporate practices or to a small number of technologically advanced States.
We need globally agreed rules that protect human dignity, preserve meaningful human oversight and ensure that the benefits of AI are shared widely and equitably.
I caution:
A technology that will affect every State must be governed by rules that every State has had the opportunity to shape.
Mr. President,
Exactly 65 years ago, that great Caribbean, French, African intellectual and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, published what has now become a classic, The Wretched of the Earth.
And across the vast range of observations and analysis that he made in that extraordinarily lucid and prescient book, he said that the issue blocking the horizon was the need for a redistribution of wealth, and that humanity would have to address that question.
My friends, this was harrowingly true in 1961.
And sadly, it remains manifest today.
This is why Barbados throws its full support behind the establishment of the International Panel on Inequality that is being proposed.
Growing inequality is at the center of geopolitical discussions, tensions, distrust in institutions and, indeed, the increasing number of conflicts that we see.
It is for this reason that we reject the notion that governments must refrain from policy interventions that are essential to creating a level and fair playing field for ordinary citizens.
We know that it is the policy choices of government that have led to this injustice, and it is the policy choices of governments that must now remove it.
For us, this is as important a battle as the climate crisis.
Mr. President,
That brings me to that crisis.
Minister Murat Kurum, representing the incoming COP31 presidency, has put the challenge plainly.
The time for simply setting out goals is behind us.
Anyone who experienced this summer in Europe and elsewhere knows that.
It was the hottest on record, and the super El Niño has not even yet hit.
The proposed action agenda places methane reduction at the center of climate implementation.
And we welcome that focus.
It is true that carbon dioxide must remain central to the global energy transition.
But emissions are not falling quickly enough.
And the full benefits of action will take time to emerge.
So, Mr. President, under Barbados’s presidency of the Climate Vulnerable Forum and its V20 countries, 74 countries got together and advanced the call to “pull the methane emergency brake.”
At the V20 ministerial dialogue in April of this year, the finance ministers agreed that methane reduction must be treated not only as an environmental priority but also as an economic, fiscal, and public-health opportunity.
We must now implement.
The climate-vulnerable countries need to mobilize approximately $490 billion each year by 2030.
And yet the current inflows are roughly $90 billion.
As the young people in Barbados would say, the math simply ain’t mathing.
We must also correct the inequity of the borrowing costs that these countries face.
It is almost 1.2 percentage points higher for climate-vulnerable countries than for advanced economies.
Now, that figure seems small to you, but that actually generates an estimated $62 billion more a year in excess interest payments.
This cannot be fair.
So believe me when I say that change is possible, as we have seen consistently with measures from the Bridgetown Initiative.
In less than one year, Barbados, as chair of the climate-vulnerable countries, the V20 countries, along with the OPEC Fund for International Development, designed and launched the Vulnerability to Viability Compact on four pillars, bringing about 74 countries along with 16 development finance institutions globally to expand access to affordable, long-term capital for education projects, health projects and water infrastructure.
The CVF also had its governors of the Central Bank meet to establish the Lifeline Fund, which will shortly be operationalized.
It seeks to provide rapid liquidity when climate shocks create balance-of-payments pressures for countries.
So we are moving to help ourselves.
We have been resolute.
And the reason for it is that we know that you cannot build hospitals and schools and water infrastructure with 10- and 15-year money.
It crowds out critical investments for our people and leaves you flat-footed.
And that is why this important initiative represents real progress.
But mechanisms such as this one cannot on their own address the underlying flaws of the international financial architecture.
I repeat that for almost five years, the Bridgetown Initiative has consistently argued that climate resilience, debt sustainability and access to affordable finance cannot be treated separately.
For many vulnerable countries, the problem is not simply the availability of capital, but whether we have the fiscal space to borrow and to invest on reasonable terms.
Mr. President,
As I turn to my region in the Caribbean, I’d like to highlight a series of crises that continue to threaten our peace, stability and development.
Let me say at the outset that when I speak about letting many hands make light work when it comes to conflict resolution, this is one of the areas in which the political leaders of the Caribbean can play a pivotal role in our own region.
Firstly, Haiti.
The security crisis continues to undermine political renewal and economic recovery.
And still, the preparations for a return to constitutional government, yes, are moving forward, even with great difficulty.
But those efforts cannot succeed unless security improves, particularly in the areas containing more than half of Haiti’s electorate in the capital and surrounding areas.
Barbados therefore supports the full deployment that has been too, too, too long promised and the renewal of the mandate of the Gang Suppression Force.
Let me remind you that it was in 2022 that this recent, more heightened state of insecurity began with the fuel riots just before the General Assembly met in 2022.
And in 2026, we have not kept faith with providing the level of security that would minimize the loss of life.
At the same time, we have to give thanks where thanks is due.
And there are Member States who have contributed in whatever way to help Haiti find its path.
This includes, of course, the Caribbean Community’s Eminent Persons Group, which has been helping to build consensus and maintain engagement with key international partners in the last few years.
In addition, Mr. President, we are deeply concerned by the worsening humanitarian pressures facing the people of Cuba.
Too many people are suffering.
Too many people.
Restrictions on trade, finance and access to fuel are intensifying hardship not only for Cuban citizens but for all others who study and live there.
Barbados has each year opposed the use of the embargo and other unilateral coercive measures against Cuba.
And as always, we call for constructive engagement.
Constructive engagement grounded in dialogue, sovereign equality and respect for international law.
That is why we are here as individual States.
We will also extend our continued solidarity to the people of Venezuela, who regrettably are recovering from the devastating double earthquakes in June.
The horror was mind-blowing.
Barbados was proud to stand with our neighbor in the immediate aftermath, dispatching our field hospital and personnel to Venezuela.
We remain committed to supporting them in their longer-term recovery.
A stable, sovereign, peaceful and democratic Venezuela is vital to the security and prosperity of not just Latin America but the wider Caribbean.
In this regard, however, I must take this opportunity to reiterate Barbados’s steadfast support to its sister CARICOM country, Guyana, as it seeks to bring a peaceful resolution through the International Court of Justice for the long-outstanding territorial controversy with Venezuela.
This is in the interest of the people of Guyana, the people of Venezuela and the wider people of the Caribbean and Latin America.
The Caribbean, my friends, must remain a zone of peace.
We cannot accept our region becoming a theatre.
We cannot accept our region becoming a theatre for confrontation or for the unilateral and unjustified use of force.
Mr. President,
That brings me to another matter.
On March 25th of this year, a historic resolution was passed in this General Assembly.
The overwhelming majority of States acknowledged the truth that we in the Caribbean long knew.
The trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans is the gravest crime against humanity.
And we know it.
Regrettably, we still carry the scars.
I’ve reminded us that it was my country, Barbados, that passed the first slave code that the world knew in 1661 to deal with chattel slavery.
Others regrettably followed, including the infamous Code Noir of 1685.
That Code Noir was only repealed this year.
And hence the wounds are still raw.
We in Barbados accept the moral responsibility of removing the cross of slavery with its horrific consequences.
We must effect healing through reparatory justice.
For it is the right thing to do.
As a result, in July of this year, CARICOM Heads of Government approved the revised CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.
For the Caribbean, for Africa and for those countries concerned, the honest engagement must begin.
And I thank President Mahama of Ghana for coming to the table with the force with which he has come.
We do not ask for reparations without accepting responsibility for our own self-repair, which we have undertaken for decades.
I want to be very clear about this, Mr. President.
I make the same mistake as President Mahama.
We are parliamentarians.
I want to make this clear.
Let there be no doubt, Mr. President, that the mindset that established, justified and sustained slavery is the same mindset that sustains the iniquities and the inequities within the power structures of this very institution and within the international financial architecture.
It is the same mindset.
It is the same mindset that caused a global map to remain grossly inaccurate on the size of Africa for centuries, as if the true size of Africa would intimidate the rest of the world into understanding its power.
Mr. President,
If we want to restore trust in these United Nations, and we want to manage transformation, as is your theme, and we want a UN that truly delivers for everyone, then at its core we must treat every human being as having equal value and deserving respect.
And I can find no better reference than His Majesty Haile Selassie, speaking in this very Assembly on the 4th of October 1963.
And those who know the words can say it with me.
Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.
Until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation.
Until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes.
There will be war.
But, Mr. President, equally, there will be no trust and no transformation.
We want peace.
And in the words of that iconic song made famous by Dionne Warwick, what the world needs now is love, sweet love.
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.
No, not just for some, but for everyone.
Love and a little kindness.
So, Mr. President,
I end this statement by returning to the beginning of a milestone of profound importance to my country and its relationship to the world.
The 9th of December this year will mark 60 years since Barbados took its place in this Organization, emerging into independence after 340 years of imperial subjugation.
On a wintry 9th of December 1966, just nine days after we achieved independence and on the very day of our admission to the United Nations, our first Prime Minister, the Right Excellent Errol Barrow, set out what, coupled with the principles of this Organization, has remained our guiding principle in dealing with the world:
That Barbados is a friend of all and a satellite of none.
Indeed, Prime Minister Barrow spoke of a world marked by profound inequalities in wealth and opportunity, which Fanon had highlighted only five years earlier in the text I quoted.
And drawing from Prime Minister Barrow’s language, where he quoted from the Hebrew Bible, he warned that newly independent countries could not remain hewers of wood and drawers of water while the wealth of the world flowed elsewhere.
He saw the United Nations as having to put the eradication of poverty at the centre of its role.
Do not question, therefore, why we view it as our duty to fight increasing global inequality.
Much good has been done by this UN in the last 60 and, in fact, 80 years.
During this time, our membership in the United Nations has been essential to Barbados’s expression of its sovereignty and its participation as an equal member of the international community.
These halls have given us a place to speak in our own name, to defend the interests of our people and others, and to help shape the decisions that affect us all.
Mr. President,
Earlier this year, our Poet Laureate stood at this rostrum and reminded us in this Assembly:
“The very name United Nations implies a commitment to ignite the fires of conscience, empathy, unity and equity.”
This UN, this United Nations, must continue to stoke those fires for a transformed and inclusive world.
I say to you as I leave this rostrum:
Let us together ensure the flames of hope, peace and dignity burn so bright that, in the midst of all the odds against us, they shine on all of the world.
I thank you.
