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Transnational criminal networks are using our ocean as a highway for illicit drugs, undermining our sovereignty and national security, destroying young lives and tearing at the fabric of our communities. Behind every statistic stands a family, a community, a young life robbed of its promise. We will not allow criminal networks to profit from the vulnerability of our people. We are amending our Dangerous Drugs Act to introduce stiffer penalties as a deterrent, and we are strengthening law enforcement to prevent and detect these crimes and to hold perpetrators accountable. In August this year, Solomon Islands acceded to the UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime, a clear demonstration of our resolve to confront this threat. These are costly and demanding undertakings, and no Pacific country can win this fight alone. We call for stronger international cooperation, greater information sharing, sustained investment in the capacity of our law enforcement agencies, and the support for prevention and rehabilitation. Our vision of a peaceful and secure Pacific extends beyond transnational crime. As enshrined in the Ocean of Peace declaration, our region must remain free of nuclear weapons and free from destabilizing external influence.
However, on this journey, we have learned something that I have come here to share with you: that is that no state can defeat an enemy that knows no borders by acting alone. The weapons that reach our streets, across several countries, the money that finances mafias is laundered far from where the crimes are committed, the routes of drug trafficking and people trafficking and illegal mining, across continents. Criminals have already globalized their cooperation. They share routes, logistics, finances, and technology without red tape, distrust, or delay. It's unacceptable that criminal organizations cooperate with one another more effectively than states do. This is the reality that the United Nations must recognize and rise to. For a long time, organized crime was dealt with as a law enforcement matter, but today we know that it's more than that. When it controls territories and infiltrates institutions, replaces legitimate authority, erodes the rule of law, and destabilizes an entire society. And when this happens in several countries at the same time, it's no longer just a domestic issue; it becomes a threat to international peace and security. I want to say this very clearly: we're not calling for other actors to act instead of states. We're calling for cooperation, with full respect for the sovereignty of each nation, and with results that we can measure. This is why Ecuador today is proposing three concrete actions. First of all, an international mechanism within the framework of the UN to trace and freeze the illicit financial flows from transnational organized crime. The money is the fuel of these networks, so let us stop it in its tracks. Second, a permanent platform of information exchange between police forces, prosecutors' offices, and financial intelligence units that enables states to anticipate rather than react once it's happened. And the third concrete action: that the UN80 initiative include transnational organized crime as a priority for conflict prevention, and provide the organization with the capacity to support states that request it. These are proposals that Ecuador is prepared to support and drive forward alongside all countries that wish to join us. Excellencies, security is not an end in itself; it's a condition for a country to be able to flourish. And today we are experiencing a crisis, a profound crisis. And recovering security means giving people back their future, for a young person to be able to choose university rather than being trapped by a criminal gang, for a family to open a business without fear, for a company to invest and create jobs, and for institutions to respond to the needs of citizens and not to illicit interests.
Every nation, regardless of population or economic power, possesses an inherent right to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national dignity. Today, however, sovereignty faces quiet, insidious threats. Transnational organized crime, drug trafficking, and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing threaten our security, wreck our marine ecosystems, and steal from our people. Because these threats interconnected, our response must be equally integrated, stronger international intelligence sharing, expanded maritime surveillance, and practical law enforcement support. It is unreasonable to expect nations safeguarding vast oceanic domains with modest budgets to meet standards set by heavily resourced states, without providing them the tools to do so.
Because even the most complex historical differences can and must be resolved by peaceful means. We are deeply concerned by the persistence of armed conflicts in different regions of the world, and their devastating consequences for civilians. In every case, our position rests on the same principles respect for the charter and international law, the protection of civilians, safe humanitarian access and dialogue and diplomacy as indispensable paths towards a just, sustainable and lasting peace. We must not grow accustomed to war. We must not accept violence as a permanent condition of our time, or allow entire generations to grow up believing that force is the only way to resolve our differences. Guatemala stands for peace. This December, we will mark 30 years since the signing of the agreement on a firm and lasting peace, which brought an end to 36 years of internal armed conflict. After years of negotiation, we chose to replace armed violence with the pursuit of dialogue. That is why we understand the value of international support and the role of the United Nations. Our experience allows us to share one conviction. Negotiation is not a sign of weakness. Dialogue does not mean abandoning our principles. Seeking peace must never mean accepting injustice. We have also contributed to United Nations peacekeeping operations More than 6300 Guatemalan women and men have served under the United Nations flag in peacekeeping operations in different parts of the world. A country that knows the cost of war must also take responsibility for helping others preserve peace. Mr. president, we must strengthen the timely exchange of information, operational and judicial coordination, border security with respect for human rights, the protection of ports and transit routes, financial and asset investigations, and the recovery of assets derived from illicit activities. We must also work together on prevention. Lasting security cannot be achieved through law enforcement alone. It requires education, decent work, resilient communities, accessible institutions and opportunities for young people. It requires us to reduce the social, territorial and economic spaces that criminal structures exploit to recruit, exert control and supplant the state.
Your excellencies, we see the cost of that neglect every day. In my region, from Lebanon to Yemen to Sudan, protracted conflict is deepening humanitarian suffering. And if anyone had any doubt that a crisis in our part of the world stays there, just look at the energy and grocery bills of ordinary families, from Mumbai to Madrid to Minnesota. The Iran war has shown how quickly instability can disrupt trade, investment and lives beyond the region. And then there is Gaza. For decades, I've stood before this assembly and warned of the dangers of leaving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict unresolved. But the international community chose to manage the conflict, not confront it. And every new Israeli violation was treated as temporary, diverting attention from the reality being created on the ground until temporary became permanent and permanent became policy. Of course, this is not the world's only injustice, but one of the world's longest running occupations forces a basic question if international law can be ignored for decades, then what exactly is that law worth and how can we enforce it if we won't even call out its violations? In Gaza, the evidence is overwhelming. In the first 300 days of the so-called cease fire, at least 300 Palestinian children were killed. Jordan's field hospitals have also been targeted. President Trump has pushed hard for peace and a path to end this war. But this Israeli government keeps moving the goalposts, continuing its attacks and destruction of civilian infrastructure, refusing to withdraw and squeezing Palestinians into barely a third of Gaza. This can no longer be dismissed as temporary military measures or a consequence of war. Accountability begins when we call things for what they are, an attempt to erase Palestinian life and impose a new territorial reality in Gaza. And while the world has been focused on Gaza, something extraordinarily dangerous is unfolding in the West Bank. Some may think we have seen this before settlements, violence, displacement, more of the same, but it is not. Nor is it simply an escalation. This is a fundamental shift. What was once a creeping process has exploded into something far more aggressive. Settler violence is rampant. Palestinians are being beaten, shot and terrorized, homes torched, property destroyed, families driven from their land and Israel is tightening its grip on more of the West Bank, seizing land, expanding settlements and pushing the Palestinians out. It is time to see what is happening for what it really is, because when the language is sanitized, the actions become normalized. Demolishing Palestinian homes to expand illegal settlements is not law enforcement. It is forcible transfer. Appropriating occupied land is not land registration. It is de facto annexation. A choking network of checkpoints and barriers is not security infrastructure. It is a system of subjugation. Systematic attacks on Palestinian communities are not settler unrest. The Israeli government criticizes the violence before the international audiences. They call those responsible a handful of rioters. They assure us that Israel is a country governed by law. Yet what's happening on the ground says otherwise. Israeli soldiers stand by as settlers attacked Palestinians, often protecting the attackers or joining them. They have blocked ambulances from reaching the injured. They have targeted international journalists who are trying to say the truth. And when soldiers watch, enable and sometimes even participate in violence against civilians, this is no longer about a handful of rioters. And the question is no longer whether a few extremists are breaking the law. The question is, is this the behavior of a democratic state governed by law? What is unfolding across the West Bank is not a series of isolated acts. It is elements of a single policy to compel an entire population to leave their land. And there is a name for that forced displacement, and that is a war crime. Your excellencies, if we are to resolve the Palestinian Israeli conflict, the world must abandon some illusions. The first is that Gaza and the West Bank are separate stories. They are not. They are two fronts of the same Israeli strategy. In both, Palestinians are being killed. In both, the reality on the ground is being remade. Gaza through destruction. The West Bank through de facto annexation. The objective is the same to make a viable Palestinian state impossible. Another illusion is that this Israeli leadership's rejection of Palestinian statehood is a position that might yet change. It is not. It is cemented on the ground. This government has been accelerating settlements and land seizures, but it began long before. Since Oslo, the map has changed piece by piece, settlement by settlement, and the most dangerous illusion that the Arab world never sought peace. The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 offered Israel normalization with 57 Arab and Muslim states, including Iran and Iraq at the time, in exchange for peace and Palestinian statehood. For over 20 years, that offer has stood. The obstacle hasn't been the absence of a partner for peace, but the absence of an Israeli government willing to accept it. This Israeli government understands the power of attention, and lately it has not liked the attention it's been getting. When confronted with evidence of wrongdoing, rather than change the course, it opts for distraction, discrediting its critics. It has also tried to cast this conflict as a war of religions Islam on one side, Judaism and Christianity on the other. It is not. This is about whether Palestinians, Muslims and Christians are entitled to the same rights as everyone else. Distractions will not fly anymore. People across the world are paying attention. The question now is, will we act? Because the world's political inaction is not for lack of options. So let's call it for what it is a choice. We have tools, sanctions, asset freezes, embargoes, diplomatic isolation, and we have a record of using them elsewhere. Yet with Israel, resolutions end where they began on paper. The result is a state without restraint. This government's sense of impunity has reached terrifying levels. It no longer feels compelled to ask, can we get away with this? It already knows the answer, and that is precisely why no one in this assembly should assume its ambitions stop at Palestine. This Israeli government's expansionist appetite is now a regional threat. And today Syria is the warning the international community is choosing not to see. Repeated incursions, creeping territorial expansion, new facts imposed on the ground, including around vital water resources, step by calculated step, Israel is testing how far it can go, and every time the international community looks away, Israel learns that it can go even further across borderlines and legal limits. For Jordan, there is no ambiguity, any threat to our northern border or our water security is a threat to our national security. Jordan will not look away. We will protect our security, our water and the interests of our people. And the question here is, if Israel continues its antagonistic approach in southern Syria, will the international community stand by and let that happen?
The biggest strength of the United Nations is that it is firmly grounded in rules we have all agreed on, and that we have all agreed apply to all of us. This foundational agreement is increasingly challenged, with alarming trends to dismiss and ignore international law altogether, which can only result in a world where might makes right. This would result in catastrophic human costs, a further proliferation of conflict, and have devastating effects on development and on human security. We hope that both small and medium sized states will come together in our common interest for a strong multilateral system on the basis of respect for international law. This is the moment for us to unify in support of what the United Nations is built on. President. Naturally, we are also strong supporters of international courts, the indispensable enforcement mechanisms of international law. Liechtenstein joined the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice four decades before we joined the UN. We have made more submissions to the court over the past decade than in its entire history before. We strongly support its work and its competence in both its advisory and dispute settlement functions. We encourage all to join us in submitting to the compulsory jurisdiction of the court. Liechtenstein is also strongly committed to the International Criminal Court, the first permanent international court with jurisdiction over the most serious crimes under international law, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. We will continue to support the court and its mandate to ensure accountability and its central message that nobody is above the law. In joining the ICC, we have exercised our sovereignty and delegated the jurisdiction we have ourselves to an international court which we have helped create. We are proud of the way the court has addressed the challenges to its resilience over the past year, in the face of relentless political attacks and unprecedented sanctions. We hope that more states will join this project, which is one of the landmark achievements in the history of international treaty making. The Rome Statute also criminalizes the supreme international crime, the crime of aggression, which complements the prohibition of the illegal use of force, the core piece of the UN charter. At the international level, by signing the UN charter, we have all agreed to refrain from the threat of, or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. This is the most ambitious collective commitment to end war that has ever existed. Amidst accelerating human suffering the world over, it has never been more important for us to implement this commitment. President.
And it is not fake. It's actually amazing But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it's super intelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of superintelligence dash SISI. Let's see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it's much more accurate. Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. We're going to find out pretty soon. Superintelligence. Every major new technology brings challenges, and superintelligence is no exception. Yet the very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead. These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster. Same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax, climate change, open borders, whoever wins AI, you have to remember this. And now I say, whoever wins s I, whoever wins, superintelligence wins. That's the group that wins. And we're leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. And we're going to keep it that way. We're going to keep it very, very straight and very strong. I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution, many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself. And we will be very careful. And that's why we have a Department of Justice that we've already used it having to do with this very subject and used it very powerfully. Everything worked out very well and very quickly. And other law enforcement bodies that will reign things in if we have to do that. But we will only encourage superintelligence. We're going to encourage it, not rein it in We're going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world in superintelligence and will continue to do so safely and responsibly. Americans have never been a nation that retreats from a frontier or shrinks from a challenge, no matter how great or how daunting that challenge may be. Freedom was not a gift that Americans won easily after 250 years, and it is not one that we will ever, ever, ever surrender. It was right here in New York City that George Washington ordered the Declaration of Independence read to his troops in 1776 as they listen to those immortal words for the first time, the patriots could see across the waters of New York Harbor to a British invasion fleet more than 100 ships strong, which had just arrived to crush the cause of liberty. Thousands of soldiers getting off those ships. Nobody stood a chance. But we won. And we won decisively. Those first Americans knew that it is not enough merely to believe in great principles. We must also have the will and the courage and the strength to defend them As we gather in this same city two and a half centuries later, to discuss the great events of our time. That is the challenge for every nation in this room. If we go forward, strong and united against the enemies of all humanity, if we reject the voices who would have us give in to fear and doubt, if we refuse to shrink from our duties to our people, then together, through bold action, we will make this world far safer and a far better place. We will leave our nations far stronger. We will grow our economies far bigger. And we will not just speak of peace, prosperity, and justice. Here at the United Nations. We will stand for them all over the world. Together, we will build a future for our people that is brighter, more hopeful, and more magnificent than ever before.
