By adhering to this manifesto, its signatories commit to eradicate poverty, to reject exclusion and to reinforce solidarity between all human beings. Next October 17, we will celebrate the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, as we have done each year since 1987. As I said on 17 th April 1989, when I visited this stone at the Human Rights Plaza in Paris, this inscription should permanently inspire our efforts to defeat poverty. I do not believe that peace is simply the absence of war.
Peace is much more than that.
We cannot talk of peace as long as there is abject poverty in the world. It is in this spirit that I invite the international community, its governmental and non-governmental institutions, all citizens who make up the peoples of the United Nations, to associate themselves, on the 17th of October this year, with the efforts of all those men and women who, by rejecting poverty, establish the conditions for peace. First of all, I am thinking of those people who, in their daily lives, struggle unceasingly against every obstacle to ensure that their families and communities have the future they deserve. They continually call humanity to assemble together, to be reconciled by standing by the poorest people. It is around the poorest, and with them, that I invite you to celebrate the next International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.