Climate Change, New Tech Regulation, US Sanctions -Boric at UNGA

The Chilean President, Gabriel Boric, urged on Wednesday, before the United Nations General Assembly, to work to address a climate crisis suffered, above all, by the most vulnerable, and to establish an ethical framework for new technologies.

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In his speech at the 78th session of the General Assembly of the UN, being held in New York, U.S. Boris said that "these are problems of today, not tomorrow. In my country, we have experienced it with fires and floods."

In this regard, the president noted that "the most vulnerable, those who have contributed the least to global warming, those who have burned the least fossil fuels, are the ones who suffer the most from this climate crisis."

Boric recalled that Chile has 43 percent of marine protected areas, as well as 22 percent of terrestrial protected areas, and that the country also aspires to be carbon-neutral by 2050 and to become a power in renewable energies.

 The president also urged the generation of an ethical regulatory framework for the use of new technologies in the context of this new industrial revolution, which, he stressed, is comparable only to that of the mid-18th century.

"It is everyone's duty to establish multilateral consensus to provide an ethical framework for the use of new technologies, such as the case of artificial intelligence. We need a framework that incorporates a human rights perspective," the Chilean president said. 

Boric also brought up the defense of democracy issue, noting that "democracy has to be capable of delivering results." In this respect, he said that "when institutions are slow to respond or fail to do so in time in a clear way, corruption, organized crime, multiple inequalities, all those challenges that are corroding our institutions, the population stops trusting. Therefore, taking care of democracy implies taking charge of the frustrations, desires and needs of the citizens."

In his speech, Boric recalled the recent commemoration in Chile of the half-century of the 1973 coup d'état against the socialist president, Salvador Allende (1970-1973), while rejecting U.S. interference at that time to destabilize the democratic government.

He condemned the unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Venezuela and Cuba, and requested the U.S. to lift them.

"We have to say clearly that when sanctions are imposed unilaterally, they are not contributing to the solution. The case of sanctions against Venezuela, today, from our perspective, do not contribute to improving the living conditions of the Venezuelan people," Boric said. 

The Chilean president also questioned the blockade imposed for decades by the U.S. against Cuba. "We cannot but say that the same violates us with respect to the sanctions so long ago established on Cuba."

Boric added: "And in this I want to be very clear: to declare that Cuba is a country that promotes terrorism is not only false, but it violates us. And therefore we urge the U.S. to follow the line taken at the time by the government of Barack Obama, when it removed them from that infamous list, which has been repeating itself for three years now and which does so much harm, not to the government, but to the Cuban people who do not deserve it."