Annan appeals to businesses to work with UN to make world fairer, stable place

Secretary-General Kofi Annan today appealed to business and labour leaders to work together and with the United Nations to reduce global risks and to help make the world a fairer and more stable place.

“Perhaps no one has more at stake than the business community itself,” the Secretary-General said in opening remarks at the one-day Global Compact Leaders Summit, which is examining the impact of the initiative he launched in 1999 to promote better corporate practices in human rights, labour and the environment.

“You have helped drive globalization [and] have benefited greatly from it. Your vision, strategies, and organization embody it. And you have even more to hope from it in the future,” he told the largest and highest-level gathering of business, labour and civil society leaders ever held at the United Nations.

Mr. Annan noted that from an initial group of fewer than 50 firms, the Compact has grown over the last four years to encompass more than 1,500 businesses from 70 countries. It also includes the major international labour federations, representing more than 150 million workers worldwide. Participants also have agreed to include a 10th principle dealing with corruption, reflecting the recently adopted UN treaty on that issue.

Nevertheless, he said, existing commitments within the Compact need to be more fully integrated into mainstream business strategies and practices, and the Compact’s activities must also enable more companies – and more people – to play an effective part at the local level.

The Compact should also have a governance structure in which leaders from all participating sectors play an active part to allow its potential to be fully sustained, and it must also contribute to improved public governance, at both national and global levels, if it is to bring about beneficial changes, the Secretary-General stressed.

However, with threats to globalization much more real now than before, and international terrorism an unmistakable threat to peace, stability and open borders, it was incumbent on all stakeholders “to protect our common space, building on what unites us,” he said.

“Our fragile global order stands in jeopardy today. Securing its future requires your resources and capacities, your advocacy, and your leadership. It calls for the unique contributions that only private enterprise can make to the creation of public value, at home and abroad,” he declared.

“So I ask all of you to work together – business, civil society, labour and governments and, of course, us – and to work with the United Nations, to reduce the global risks we all face, and to realize the promise of a fairer more stable world,” he said.