UN General Assembly adopted a new resolution on global road safety

The UN General Assembly has adopted a new resolution on global road safety, recalling that the Sustainable Development Goals are integrated and indivisible, and acknowledging the importance of reaching the road safety-related targets of the 2030 Agenda.

Endorsing the Stockholm Declaration, approved at the third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety (Stockholm – 19 & 20 February 2020), this new document reiterates its invitation to Member States and the international community to intensify national, regional and international collaboration to ensure political commitment and responsibility at the highest possible level for improving road safety. Proclaiming the period 2021–2030 as the Second Decade of Action for Road Safety the goal is to reduce road traffic deaths and injuries by at least 50 per cent by 2030.

Among its many provisions the new UNGA resolution also:

• Requests the World Health Organization and the United Nations regional commissions, in cooperation with other partners in the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration and other stakeholders, to prepare a plan of action of the Second Decade as a guiding document to support the implementation of its objectives;
• Invites Member States to consider establishing mechanisms for the periodic assessment of vehicles in order to ensure that all new and in-use vehicles comply with basic vehicle safety regulations.

The UNGA also decided to convene a high-level meeting of the General Assembly, no later than the end of 2022, on improving global road safety, and to include in the provisional agenda of its seventy-sixth session the item entitled “Improving global road safety”.