Participation

As Permanent Representative for the past three and a half years, I know that the Council’s richest, most meaningful exchanges have come when we have heard from real people — when Nadia Murad Basee Taha, a Yazidi woman trafficked by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), implored the Council to take action because ISIL, in her words, was using rape “to ensure that women could never again lead a normal life” (S/PV.7585, p.6); or when Dr. Zaher Sahloul returned from eastern Aleppo to relay the pleas of the city’s doctors that wounded children be allowed to be evacuated; or when Jackson Niamah, a Liberian health- care worker, briefed the Council (see S/PV.7268), at the height of the Ebola crisis, on the anguish of turning away infected patients and their children for a lack of supplies and beds. When we on the Council show leadership and put people at the centre of our decisions, the effect is powerful. It can change minds.