Honorable dignitaries and ministers, my fellow panelists, respected brothers and sisters who are all here as distinguished champions of and champions for justice. My dear friend and brother Javier, the Board of Trustees of World Jurist Association.

As was just said a minute ago, the lesson from Albania to the world, I would like to begin with my sincere thanks and gratitude as an Indian to the people of Albania who gave not only in Sister, Mother and Saint Teresa a humanitarian, a beacon of light, but also a symbol of love, of justice and of service to the entire world. Thank you.

What Mother Teresa, what Saint Teresa taught us was another kind of force, the force of love and today as all of us gather here together to strengthen the Rule of Law, we must remember that they are both the same truth just acknowledged and spoken about in different words, the force of love and the force of law. They must work and work together to strengthen civilization and humanity.

What is the Rule of Law? I asked last year at the World Law Congress to my 11-year-old son and he replied that it is the force or it is the distinguishing factor between good and evil, it is the difference between good and evil. So the Rule of Law is not only about crime or punishment, it is the solemnness promise that we have, promises that we have made to ourselves as a society or as a civilization, to our fellow human beings. It is how we ensure access to education. It is how we ensure access to employment. It is how we ensure access to services. It is how we ensure access to health.It is how we ensure access to dignity, and life with dignity is the fundamental right and promise of the Rule of Law.

I am here to also talk about my experiences in the protection of children. And when a child becomes a victim of a crime, especially a sexual crime, that is a trauma that the child carries forever.

That is an evil. When it is perpetrated, it perpetuates forever. And a child who is unsafe in one part of the world is a threat to the rule of law and the rule of justice everywhere in the world.

With the idea that if we fail to protect our children today, nothing else matters tomorrow. So, I would like to share with you what we have been able to achieve for the protection of children working together, especially in the last year where the World Law Congress, one of the oldest, one of the most respected, one of the most far-reaching and powerful institutions in the world, the most respected institution in the world, gave its support and lent its weight behind the cause of the protection of children and launched Jurists for Children Worldwide. We thought that the Rule of Law should transcend from being an ideal or a philosophy or things that is being spoken about in courtrooms or in conferences.

The Rule of Law must reach the people, the most vulnerable people. And it should become everybody’s collective, conscious and behavioral change issue. And we picked up one specific thing as Jurists for Children Worldwide.

An initiative of the World Jurist Association and the Just Rights for Children, we said that we are going to rid the world of child marriage. Child marriage, as an example, that we took, was a crisis of health, it was a crisis of education, it was a crisis of protection, it was a crisis of economy, it was a crisis of fear, and it was a crisis of unjust laws and practices that allowed for our children to be raped in the name of marriage, to be abused in the name of marriage, with no recourses to laws. And we started on the ground by protecting or saving or prohibiting child marriages from taking place.

We started with the idea that the law must reach the child and with innovative things like taking injunctions for the first time, calling up the police when a child was getting married, working with the governments in many, many countries and working to create laws that make or they call child marriage for what it truly is, child rape, and make it a criminal justice issue, we as Jurists for Children worldwide took this message across the globe. Across 99 countries, I would like to share with you, in one year, the message that we started with in the Dominican Republic, in one year we have been able to take it to 99 countries, we have been able to physically stop over 200,000 child marriages from taking place. We have been able to rescue, with the enforcement of the Rule of Law, over 60,000 children in the last one year alone.

And this, my dear friends and colleagues, has been possible only due to the efforts of people such as yourselves. People who chose not to remain silent, people who said, wherever we might be, we might be a businessman, we might come from the government, we might be a lawyer, we might be a professor, we might be working on issues of artificial intelligence or on economy, we might be working on health, but we will do whatever is possible in our lives to work for the protection of children and when the UN feared that it would take 300 years to end the scourge of child marriage, with over 12 million child marriages taking place every year in the world, that is 12 million children being raped, 12 million children not finding access to the Rule of Law, 12 million girls who cannot participate in the economic workforces of nations and their families and who remain a burden on societies, when the UN feared it would take 300 years, we embarked upon this journey and I am pleased to share with you that in the last one year alone, we have been able to reduce in India the prevalence rate of child marriage from 24% to less than 15% and together we will save and protect all these children within the next five years, within this generation, the Rule of Law will reach out to every child and make child marriage history. It started in one such world law congress, we are here today to reiterate that promise that we made to ourselves a year ago and we are here to reiterate that promise that the rule of law must reach every country, every state, every city, every village, every household.

One of our colleagues yesterday had said in his acceptance speech, he had said that the best teachers make people love what they teach, the best teachers make people or make students fall in love with what they are teaching. That is our biggest goal, that should be our biggest ambition. We the people who understand laws, we the people who understand the value of justice, we the people who have taken it upon ourselves to uphold this value, we must take this value to the last person, the most vulnerable, the last child and we must ensure that the Rule of Law belongs to the people, not only in terms of understanding, not only in terms of respecting, but we create a society where people love the laws.

And when, thank you, that is something that appealed to you apparently, it took, that is, it’s a play of words that I thought to myself, in law we trust, but we also hold the law in trust for our children and that is a weight, that is a responsibility that all of us also carry. When people, when children, they uphold justice, when they uphold laws, when they are protected through laws, that is the time when my dear friends and brothers and sisters, when children grow up to respect laws and when children grow up to respect laws, that is the time when, we were discussing in the panel earlier, that is consciousness change and behavior change. The behavior change of culture will come from what we practice every day, what we choose to do every day and that is the society that we intend to build.

We did not inherit this world, as I was saying, only for ourselves, we also inherited for our children and the rule of law and the commitment to justice must be practiced like religion and must be universalized. Universalized as a value of life, universalized as we have globalized economies, universalized so that it reaches everyone and all and legal justice, not only social justice, not only economic justice, but legal justice for everyone is a birthright and we must pledge that together we shall have it. For us, through strengthening policies, through strengthening institutions, through building capacity, through making knowledge accessible to all, through getting communities together, through use of technology to reach or enable justice or access to justice, in the next one year, when we come back to Albania, we must promise to ourselves that we will be the last generation that sees unjust laws, lack of laws, non-enforcement of laws.

As the Honorable Prime Minister was saying earlier and giving an example of wearing seatbelts, people will respect laws when they also fear laws. I talked about the love for laws. I am also talking about the respect and the fear for laws.

Prevention of crime is the biggest challenge. It is the biggest goal, the target for all of us, for all justice delivery systems, but prevention must be accompanied by protection, protection must be accompanied by prosecution and the goal of prosecution must also be to prevent so that life comes a full circle. With that idea, with that philosophy, with that goal, that there is no bigger threat in society than, or no bigger injustice in society than what is perpetuated through an unjust law, we resolve here to come back to the World Law Congress with a renewed commitment of making at least one issue, one injustice in the world history and we are well on our way to protecting all children worldwide through the efforts.

I would like to invite all of you to join hands with us. I would like to invite all of you to join in the spirit of service and the spirit of justice which has been well initiated by Mother Teresa, Saint Teresa and which is the spirit that resides within all of us. Thank you all very much and thank you once again to the people of Albania for your warm welcome.

I hope to see you next year with Albania being well on its way to being the champion of law, the champion of justice. Thank you. Thank you.