Speech by Commissioner Lahbib at the UN General Assembly on Protecting Civilians Better

Across the world civilians are paying an unbearable price for war.

The images appear on our screens almost daily. Families searching for food and water under bombardment. Children pulled from the rubble. People fleeing, again and again.

Too often, the international community fails to protect them.

The UN Secretary-General's report on the Protection of Civilians is clear. The gap is widening between what we promise around conference tables and what people face on the ground.

Last year, 37,000 civilian deaths were recorded. That is only the documented number. The real toll is certainly higher.

I have met the people who are living this reality in the Democratic Republic of Congo and at the border of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. I have seen what it means for one family to lose their home, their children's school, and their jobs, all at once.

That is why we are here: to protect these families.

What alarms me most is the scale of civilian suffering. Sometimes, that suffering is not a consequence of war, it is a deliberate strategy yet the political will to stop it keeps falling short.

Protecting civilians is our shared responsibility, but shared responsibility must mean more than everyone doing their own part, in their own corner.

We need to join forces and use our different tools and mandates together to be more effective on the ground. Allow me set out where the European Union stands.

Earlier this year, the EU reaffirmed our commitment to international humanitarian law in a new Communication. Our position is simple: the rules of war are not optional. Protecting civilians cannot depend on where a war is fought, who is fighting it, or who the victims are.

But defending the rules on paper is not enough. We have to make them work where lives are being destroyed right now in Gaza City, El Fasher, Kyiv, Port-au-Prince, Myanmar.