A/HRC/33/21 6. In his welcoming remarks,1 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said that, 30 years ago, the Declaration on the Right to Development had broken new ground in the struggle for greater freedom, equality and justice. It acclaimed long-lost freedoms and independence, and reasserted equality for all nations and peoples, including their right to self-determination and their right to sovereignty over natural resources. The Declaration placed individuals at the heart of development, and it called for all to be empowered to participate fully and freely in vital decisions. It demanded equal opportunities and the equitable distribution of economic resources, especially for people traditionally marginalized, disempowered and excluded from development. 7. The Declaration called for better governance of the international economic framework and redefined development as far deeper, broader and more complex than the narrow, growth-and-profit focus of previous decades. Although some progress had been made towards realizing that vision, progress had been uneven, particularly for people in Africa, least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, small island developing States and most other developing countries. Persistent poverty and rising inequalities continued to rob people of their rights and fuelled multiple crises and conflicts. Trade and investment policies and agreements could also have profound implications on the realization of human rights. Recently, sprawling pacts known as megaregionals had begun to change the landscapes of trade and investment in quite unprecedented ways. 8. The High Commissioner affirmed that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference Financing for Development and the Paris Agreement on climate change had set forth detailed and realistic programmes that built on each other, with the potential to transform the realization of human rights. The 2030 Agenda promised to end extreme poverty and promoted an integrated vision of development with shared responsibilities. That vision was born of the Declaration, which offered prevention since it promised solutions for root causes, including structural challenges at all levels. At the international level, the right to development addressed multiple challenges originating in a failure to adequately regulate globalization. The engines of globalization, such as trade, investment, finance and intellectual property, must be compatible with the human rights obligations of States. 9. The 2030 Agenda addressed many of the systemic obstructions that disadvantaged the poor, such as distorted trade frameworks and weak international governance over powerful transnational actors. It promised better regulation of global financial markets and an enhanced voice for developing countries in international economic and financial institutions. It committed all States to cooperate for international development and endorsed the principle of special and differential treatment. It also contained strong commitments to provide access to justice for all, with effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels, and to end corruption. 10. Thus, the 2030 Agenda was a child of the right to development. It echoed the Declaration’s emphatic call for “equal attention and urgent consideration” to the implementation, promotion and protection of all civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, and its insistence that the promotion of, respect for and enjoyment of one socalled “category” of human rights could not justify the denial of other human rights and fundamental freedoms. Moreover, the right to development extended even beyond the massive global agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals; it offered a framework in which to address gaps and failures in responsibility, accountability and regulation in both 1 The full text of the statement is available from www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20163&LangID=E. 3