High-Level Meeting on Global Health and Foreign Policy

Speaking points
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• It is a pleasure to welcome you to this meeting. The fact that foreign policy has an impact on health is intuitively understood, as is the fact that efforts to improve health can improve relations within and between countries.
• A year ago, some of our colleagues acted on this intuitive understanding, and decided to examine more closely the need to look at foreign policy through a “health lens”.
• Working together, the Foreign Ministers of Brazil, France, Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand and Norway developed a common understanding, which in Oslo in March of this year produced the Oslo Declaration and Agenda for Action on Global Health – A Pressing Foreign Policy Issue of Our Time.
• You have this Declaration and Agenda before you. You will find that it reflects on shared values and mutual interests in an increasingly globalised and interdependent world, comments on how foreign policy can help to fill gaps and in international cooperation on health and analyses how cooperation on health-related issues can be used as a tool in diplomacy.
• Our starting point is the interdependence that results from globalisation. This offers us new opportunities for progress, but also makes us more vulnerable, particularly from a global health security point of view. In your folders, you will also find background information on these issues.
• Your presence here today signals your interest in and concern for these issues. I welcome this warmly. Our purpose in calling this meeting is to invite others to join with us – both politically and in practical terms – by supporting the Declaration and Agenda for Action, and especially by engaging in cooperation on one or more issues.
• We hope in this way to mobilise greater forces for global health security, and to improve how we deal with threats to it. Not least, we want to make globalisation work to these ends, for the benefit of all.
• It is our goal to increase awareness of global health in what we do – whatever the context. We hope that you will develop this agenda and take it with you into various forums for cooperation, both at home and abroad.