Bahamian Prime Minister Philip E. Davis has called for an international rules-based order that is beneficial to all.
‘It is not the small states who are dismantling the rules-based order. Small countries cannot dismantle a rules-based world. But we will be the first to be crushed beneath its collapse,’ warned Davis in addressing the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly Debate on Friday.
‘Great powers can survive the end of the rules. Small states cannot. For us, a rules-based world is our shield.
‘The rules have not always been applied fairly,’ he added. ‘But the answer is not a world without rules. It is rules that bind the strong as firmly as the weak. International order, where rules apply only to the weak, is not order. It is a hierarchy.’
The prime minister said, when the Bahamas defends multilateralism, it is not defending a bureaucracy; it is defending ‘the only successful arrangement in which a nation of 400,000 people can stand at this podium as the sovereign equal of a nation of a billion people.
‘A world without rules is not a free world; it is Melos,’ he said, referring to the small island, where, 250, 000 years ago, the envoys of Athens stood before it ‘and told its people a simple truth about power: ‘The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.’
Davis said the formation of the United Nations was the world’s answer to Melos.
‘I do not appeal to conscience. Small states have done that for decades. Today, I appeal to your interests,’ he said. ‘What is in your best interest? No wall is high enough to keep out rising warming seas. No border strong enough to stop a pandemic. Narrow self-interest asks what you can take today. Enlightened self-interest asks what kind of world you will have to live in tomorrow.’
The Bahamian Prime Minister said the international, rules-based order benefits all.
‘They are not arbitrary having been arrived at through lived experience,’ he said. ‘Every rule you break today is a rule you will need tomorrow. Every institution you starve is one you will one day call upon. Every small nation you abandon is a crisis you will one day inherit.
‘Defending the rules is not a favor to the small; it an insurance for the strong,’ he added.
Davis said nowhere is that truer than the climate crisis.
‘Here, too, we are told there is uncertainty,’ he said. ‘There is none. The sea does not negotiate. It does not read communiqués. And it does not recognize a veto.’
In 2024, he said, for the first time, the world was more than one and a half degrees warmer for an entire year.
‘The line which small island states fought to write into the Paris Agreement, has already been crossed,’ said Davis, pointing to a new report released only days ago, warning that the El Niño phenomenon, now heating the planet, is likely to cost some 450, 000 lives by next February.
He noted that, in 2019, Hurricane Dorian inflicted damage and losses on the Bahamas equal to roughly a quarter of its national output.
‘Families watched the sea take the only land they had,’ Davis said. ‘Most of my country sits barely above sea level. For us, a rising ocean is not a forecast. It is a boundary inching towards our doorsteps.’
He said that is why the Bahamas ‘proudly’ endorsed Thursday’s Declaration on Sea-Level Rise, which affirms that ‘our statehood, our boundaries and our seat in this Assembly will not be washed away by the sea.
‘The science is certain,’ the Bahamian leader said. ‘Last year, the International Court of Justice made clear that the law is also certain. The injustice is certain, too.
‘The people who bear least responsibility are asked to adapt first, pay more, and recover from disasters they did not cause,’ he added. ‘And the self-interest is certain. People who lose their homes do not disappear. They move, and they arrive at someone’s border. Prevention costs less than rebuilding or relocating.’
Davis said while the Bahamas is taking action, ‘no nation, acting alone, can hold back the tides.
‘Nor can we build resilience inside a financial system designed at Bretton Woods in 1944, which still declares us too prosperous to help, until the next storm makes us poor,’ he said. ‘The Vulnerability Index exists. The Loss and Damage Fund exist. What is missing is the power shift to make them operational and real.’
The Bahamian Prime Minister warned that the next contest for power will not only be fought over land and sea but will be fought over data.
‘Our citizens’ data crosses the world without a visa and without a vote,’ he said. ‘It leaves our shores as raw material, and returns as products we must buy.
‘We have seen this pattern before,’ he added. ‘My islands once exported salt, sponge and sisal. Others set the price. Others kept the profit. The commodity has changed. The pattern has not. This is colonization by data.
‘I am talking about the capacity of a people to govern their own digital lives,’ he continued. ‘People whose daily lives and histories are being mined, should decide where their data lives, who may use it and on what terms. Those people should be able to share in the value which their data creates.
‘It means building artificial intelligence that understands our languages, our laws and our lives, not only the lives of those in the wealthy North and dominate languages and cultures,’ Davis said. ‘And it means taking part in the digital age on our own terms, not as consumers of other people’s systems, but as builders of our own.’
The prime minister, therefore, asked the General Assembly to support the nomination of Stephen Bereaux for Deputy Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union.
Stating that five nations still hold a veto over the peace of 193 nations, Davis disclosed that the Bahamas is seeking a seat on the Security Council for the 2032-2033 term.
‘The Bahamas does not seek a seat on the Council to sit quietly inside that arrangement,’ he said. ‘We seek it to help change it: a Council that reflects the world as it is, and that gives small island states a dedicated seat at the table where our survival is decided.’
The Bahamian leader said change must also reach the leadership of the United Nations, stating that his country also supports the candidature of Guyana’s Ambassador to the UN, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, for secretary-general.
‘A former foreign minister who has presided over the Security Council, she understands what rules mean for nations with no other protection,’ he said. ‘In 81 years, this organization has had nine secretaries-general. All of them men. None has come from the Caribbean. The Bahamas believes the time has come for both to change.’
Davis also called for the lifting of the strengthened blockade against Cuba, an end to the fuel blockade, and Cuba’s removal from the unilateral list of alleged state sponsors of terrorism.
‘The Cuban people are suffering,’ he said. ‘We call on all states to respect Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace.’
On Haiti, the Bahamian Prime Minister said it was ‘the first nation on Earth born from a successful revolt by enslaved people.
‘For that act of courage, it was made to pay,’ he said. ‘In 1825, under the guns of a foreign fleet, Haiti was compelled to compensate its former colonizers for its own freedom. It took Haiti more than a century and a half to pay that compensation.
‘If you want to see what sovereignty costs when it is only allowed, and never respected, look at Haiti,’ Davis added. ‘When the Security Council meets on the 30th of September, we urge it to renew the mandate under Resolution 2793, and to give the Gang Suppression Force the resources to deliver, in a partnership that respects Haitian sovereignty.’
He said that, this month, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) advanced its 10-Point Plan for reparatory justice, building on the General Assembly’s recognition, in March, of the trafficking and racialized enslavement of Africans, as crimes against humanity.
‘The wealth of empires was built on the stolen lives of our ancestors, including enslaved children,’ Davis said. ‘It is important that the former colonizers have recognized this atrocity, as recognition was a vital step.
‘But recognition without repair is only a sentence on a page,’ he added, calling on ‘the nations that profited to engage seriously with reparatory justice: truth, apology, restoration and development.’