Speech at UN Day Prayer in Helsinki Cathedral, October 26th 2026
Honorary guests,
Dear friends,
In these times marked by wars, declining trust and polarization, when we way too often see the ugliest sides of humanity, I think a lot about what it requires to build peace. I don’t think we talk about it often enough, about what a tremendously difficult and important task it is.
Because even as there are rights and wrongs when it comes to war and peace, there are perpetrators and there are victims, there is also a saying that there is no such thing as a perfect peace. In real life, justice is seldom served as in the bedtime stories we tell our children.
Years of destruction, painful losses and situations where people have had to face the hardest things imaginable cannot be undone. Still, building peace requires the ability to move on. Often the hardest part is to find a way to continue living, maybe next to those that just yesterday were enemies.
Here in Finland, peace meant loss of land, reparations and traumas that still are present, but still this nation managed to build the welfare state during the decades that followed, with the help of a strong belief in the future.
In Europe, the European integration project started with the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community, just six years after all the casualties and horrors of the Second World War, as a remarkable sign of determination to never again witness the same and of faith in the European project.
Building peace requires learning mercy. As the passage from Luke 6 tells us; to love our enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. This is one of the most difficult and demanding tasks we can face as humans. Still, it has been done, and can be done.
A central part of the peace building efforts in the post-world war era were of course also the institutions that today form our multilateral system.
The UN Charter, the international human rights conventions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court – the whole UN system and all of our institutions of international law – were created to enable setting disputes between states without use of force, to codify and strengthen the rules that guide how states interact with each other, to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals from persecution and repression.
Through these institutions, the global community was given a tool for joint responses to challenges and crises that we all are facing and to end impunity for the worst of crimes known to mankind.
Dear friends,
And I am sorry to say this, but I do think that today this system is facing its biggest challenges since the time it was created.
One of these challenges is the acute financing crisis, as funding to the multilateral development system dropped more than 15% globally in 2024, and is expected to continue to decrease through 2027 to a decline by even 30% globally. The UN and its agencies are experiencing an acute funding crisis, severely impacting on the possibilities to respond to crises and needs – meaning less peacekeeping missions, less humanitarian aid operations, less human rights missions and less independent investigations in conflicts.
And at the same time, conflicts are at its highest level at any point since the Second World War. Fatalities are estimated to be at the highest numbers since the Rwandan genocide. One very worrying specific feature is the increase in conflicts between states.
So as the UN has marked its 80-year anniversary, it is needed more than ever. But it is challenged foremost by the ideological and political shift in thinking that has happened, hand in hand with the retreat of democracy for autocracy in more and more parts of the world.
The most powerful leaders in the world are using violence and force and flagrantly breaching the UN Charter and international law calling the multilateral order obsolete. Around the world, a whole generation of young people have been shocked by the silence and inaction of the Western world faced with the genocide in Gaza.
They are rightfully asking why no-one is acting to stop human suffering and destruction. In other parts of the world, the wonders concern the lack of attention when it comes to Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen.
Silence is also a threat to the multilateral system. Every time we look away, every time we decide not to act, every time we prioritize economic or security interests over the very rules that exist to keep us all safe, we are a part of this dangerous development.
Dear friends,
As I said in the beginning, building peace is hard.
But it has been done in circumstances that were much more difficult than the ones we are in now, and it can be done again.
And that project must start with commitment. We have no police to enforce the judgements of our international institutions, and no-one to force countries to abide by the UN Charter. International law has always been, and will always be, based on our collective commitment, to the system and the principles it is built on.
Therefore, we need to be forming alliances globally to build leadership that is committed to respect for existing rules, making use of existing institutions, and actively developing them. This is the most important task for democracies around the world at the moment.
We need to strengthen the financing of multilateral development. We can and should reform the multilateral system, but with the aim of strengthening it. We need consistent action instead of double standards. No breach of rules should go without condemnation. No breach of rules should go without consequences. This is our shared responsibility.
And we need to learn again to look at everything that unites us.
There are so many questions we need to address together, so many tasks for the institutions that we have created to ensure peace and prosperity globally: the need for global governance structures to respond to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the unprecedented concentration of power and wealth and the climate crisis, to mention a few examples. Just this week, UNEP published a report showing how the world has surpassed the 1,5 degree threshold for global warming. This is an existential question, uniting us all.
Dear friends,
While it seems a big part of the world has forgotten many lessons of history that should never be forgotten, we still have so much to defend and far too much to lose, if we don’t succeed in fighting for the values and ideas upon which the multilateral system is built.
Building peace is hard, but it is the most important shared responsibility that we have.