Myriam Baele, Chair of ENMO
Roman Schremser, Vice-Chair,
Dear colleagues and friends,
Good morning and a very warm welcome to all of you who are here with us in person at WHO;
And good morning, good afternoon and good evening to those joining us online, wherever you are in the world.
WHO is proud to host this meeting of the Ethics Network of Multilateral Organizations, bringing together senior professionals from about 50 multilateral and inter-governmental institutions.
This meeting, and your work, is vital to the success of our organizations.
It provides a forum for exchanging information and experience to improve the capacities, standards, practices and core responsibilities for the ethics function among member organizations.
I also thank you for the important work you do to protect and promote the mental health of our colleagues in each of our institutions.
This has become especially relevant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which took a heavy toll on mental health.
Together with other services such as Ombudsperson and human resources, you provide significant support to colleagues who are facing mental health challenges.
In addition to its impact on mental health, as you know, COVID-19 also took a heavy toll on trust in public institutions.
Governments, scientists, researchers, public health officials and multilateral institutions were all exposed to heavy scrutiny and heavy criticism – some of it fair, some of it not.
And that’s why the work that you all do is so important, because fundamentally, it’s about trust.
Ethics are about earning and retaining the trust of Member States, partners, donors, our own staff and the communities we serve.
Ethics functions are the moral compass of an organization, guiding its actions and decisions.
They’re about achieving the right results, the right way; not just what we do, but how we do it.
Ethics are even especially important in our age of political tension, polarization and mis- and disinformation.
They help us navigate ethical challenges, make ethical decisions, and uphold the commitment to doing the right thing, even when faced with difficult choices.
Here at WHO, ethics are critical to our success.
And as Andreas has said earlier, over the past 7 years, we have been transforming WHO to make it more effective and efficient, and ethics have been a key part of that transformation.
One of the 7 workstreams of our transformation has been to develop a new set of values.
To do this, we asked our global workforce which values are the most important to them.
Their answers became the new WHO Values Charter, with five key values: trust, professionalism, integrity, collaboration and people caring about people.
Building on those values, we have also been working to build a mature, independent, well-resourced and fully functioning Ethics function in WHO.
Just last year we launched a new set of policies, including a new Code of Ethics, a new Policy on Prevention Against Retaliation, and a new policy on preventing and addressing abusive conduct.
We have also made it easier for staff to access these policies and made them more comprehensive.
We have also united all our investigative activities under one roof, in the department of Independent Oversight Services, IOS.
For WHO, ethics is an especially important area of work, because it applies not only to our work as an organization, but also to the work of scientists and researchers around the world.
Many of our Member States have asked for our support in guiding them on the ethics of using new technologies in health service delivery and biomedical research.
That includes artificial intelligence, digital health records, or new technologies for human genome editing.
My colleagues in our department of Compliance, Risk and Ethics, and in our Science Division work closely together to protect the quality of our work, the safety of the people we serve as well as our own staff, and the reputation of our organization.
We want to ensure that we keep ourselves to the highest standards.
A strong ethics function is therefore key to our success, and in turn, to our mission of promoting, providing and protecting the health of the world’s people.
So I’m pleased that part of your work this week is to consider standards of practice for the ethics function.
These standards will create a good basis for defining the responsibilities, practices and parameters for ethics offices in multilateral organizations.
Independence, impartiality and confidentiality are its hallmarks.
Minimum standards for position descriptions will facilitate the recruitment of qualified and versatile ethics officers globally.
Thank you all once again for your commitment to building strong ethics functions in each of our organizations, and to nurturing the most important commodity we have: trust.
I wish you all a very fruitful and successful meeting.
Thank you.