SECRETARY BLINKEN: Hello, everyone.
I’m honored to welcome you to the 10th session of the
Conference of the States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption.
The United States sought to host this conference because the fight for good governance,
accountability, transparency — vital to our national security
and to delivering for our citizens.
Corruption threatens all of that, not just for the United States,
but for all 190 states parties to this convention.
As President Biden has said, it’s a cancer in the body of societies.
Corruption exacerbates inequality and political polarization.
Corruption undermines our responses to crises, from pandemics to natural disasters.
Every dollar stolen is a dollar that we cannot invest in our schools or our hospitals,
in our businesses or our public pensions.
Corruption erodes citizens’ faith in government and their trust in one another,
polarizing our politics, dividing our communities, exacerbating crime and conflict.
And corruption can be weaponized by countries and actors looking to do harm to our security,
to our economies, to our political system.
And every one of these harms hits underserved and marginalized populations the hardest.
Yet, for every one of these negative consequences, the flipside is also true.
Creating more transparent, accountable governance is one of the most powerful ways
that we can build more inclusive opportunity.
Greater security. Better public services.
More respect for human rights —
and more ways for citizens to seek justice when those rights are abused.
In sum, it’s crucial to building the societies that people in all of our communities
and countries want and deserve.
These are all reasons President Biden issued the first-ever
U.S. Strategy on Countering Corruption in 2021,
setting out a whole-of-government approach that has guided our efforts.
One of the strategy’s pillars is strengthening the international anti-corruption architecture,
of which the UN convention — and this conference — is a key part.
A few months ago, the United States put out a comprehensive report on how we're doing
on meeting our commitments, because holding ourselves accountable is an important way to
model the transparency that we want to foster
and to highlight challenges where we can use some help.
That's the spirit we bring to hosting this conference.
Two decades since the adoption of this convention, all states parties —
and indeed everyone here who works on promoting good governance —
has an opportunity and a responsibility to take a candid look at where we’ve made progress
and where we’ve come up short.
We have to recommit ourselves to turning the pledges we made into reality.
In those areas where we have work to do —
whether that’s strengthening asset recovery
efforts to return stolen resources to their rightful owners
or increasing financial transparency in high-risk sectors like real estate
or eliminating the safe havens that corrupt actors use to hide their illicit profits —
we must harness the experience, the knowledge, and the ingenuity
of the widest range of partners if we’re going to find solutions.
Indeed, if we’ve learned anything from our recent efforts, it’s that no institution or organization,
no government or group of governments, can effectively combat corruption alone.
That means we need to break down the silos between law enforcement, prosecutors,
public health officials, development practitioners, and other officials
whose efforts are weakened by corruption.
We need to reach across borders, sharing what works in fighting impunity,
just as corrupt actors are constantly taking pages from one another’s playbooks.
And we need to reach outside government — to team up with civil society, the private sector,
and directly with citizens, all of whom have a profound stake in this fight
and important tools and perspectives to bring to bear.
That's the story of our proud host city, Atlanta,
and I’d like to thank Mayor Dickens for welcoming us here.
Atlanta is renowned for being the birthplace of many civil rights trailblazers,
including Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Bolden.
One of the shared qualities that made these individuals such transformative leaders
was their ability to make people — ordinary citizens —
believe that they were capable of ending entrenched injustices
that many had endured for their entire lives.
And they were able to rally diverse coalitions to their cause.
Businesses. Faith groups. Students. Unions.
To break out of the cycle of impunity and hopelessness,
we need the same kind of inclusive leadership.
Such inclusive leadership was on full display yesterday when we hosted the first-ever
Anti-Corruption Civil Society Forum, which brought together anti-corruption and
transparency advocates, journalists, human rights defenders, youth leaders, academics,
and others together with representatives from government from every region of the world.
We hope that future hosts will make this forum a regular occurrence.
And we urge every state party to bring the same approach to efforts to combat corruption.
So, thank you for joining us.
I wish you lively and productive discussions in the days ahead.
And we look forward to learning from you and working with you.
Thank you very much.