It is a great honor for me to be here with you again today, and to be given the opportunity to address our hosts, the Afghan human rights community, on this vital theme, at this crucial moment, and on this historic occasion.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are fully committed to fulfilling the role that the people of Afghanistan expect of us. That role is defined in the Bonn Agreement, which mandates the United Nations to cooperate with you and to support you in implementing your human rights agenda.

I personally am acutely aware that we cannot play our role fully if we enter in judgment or arrogance, but only if we join you in humility, in solidarity and in a realistic understanding of the challenges at hand. Our role is not to preach, but to listen. Not to direct, but to support.

As my friend and colleague Mary Robinson has repeatedly emphasized, it can only be for the people of Afghanistan to determine the course of their human rights renaissance. After all, while each of us has an important contribution to make, human rights here belong not to the UN, not to the international community, not to the government, and not to the NGOs. They belong only to the people of Afghanistan, and the people of Afghanistan, long denied their rights to food, to health, to education, to equality, and to personal security, will not now allow anyone to deny them their right to decide their own future.

Clearly, the people of Afghanistan need no lessons in this from anyone. They have learned in their own flesh and blood, during these 23 years of bitter conflict that sustainable peace can only be built on a foundation of human rights for all. Only a broad-based, multi-ethnic government, respectful of human rights and guided by the rule of law, can hope to restore to Afghanistan the stability, prosperity, and hope that the people of this country have so long been denied.

Thus, we are well aware that it is not our job to tell you what human rights are. Afghans themselves know what human rights are, and are not. Afghans themselves have long suffered in their struggle for human rights. No one knows the meaning of the right to food better than the hungry. No one knows the meaning of the right to personal security better than those who have faced the torturer. No one knows the meaning of the right to adequate housing better than those who have lived in the cold, and the uncertainty of the refugee camp.

In the end, of course, it is not the grand rhetoric of written accords, speeches, and solemn declarations that will restore peace and human rights to a country. Rather it is the hard work, and the courage of the people claiming their rights.

And it is Afghans themselves who will lay the course of that work, and they that will set the priorities. It is our duty is to respect your decisions, and our honor to support your human rights vision, your human rights institutions, and your human rights projects and activities. For our part we can promise that the new United Nations mission here will be guided by the principles of Afghan leadership, Afghan ownership, and Afghan participation.

Today, we come to listen. To hear from you the details of how you wish to bring to life your human rights commission, your human rights education program, and your plans for enhancing accountability and equality. To hear from you how, in concrete terms, we can help to support those plans.

If there is one thing that all our UN colleagues have heard loudly from all Afghans in their travels in all parts of the country, it is this: the most urgent human rights imperative is the imperative of peace. Yesterday, we were told by the women of Afghanistan that the peace that Afghans of both genders seek is a sustainable peace. And if history is any lesson, the only sustainable peace is a peace that leads to a political and social system in which the fundamental rights of each are fully respected.