Jean Todt started by mentioning the initiatives carried out by the FIA and the UN to promote road safety globally. In particular, he talked about the #3500LIVES road safety campaign, which was launched in March 2017 by the FIA, in partnership with outdoor advertising leader JCDecaux and which has been displayed in more than 900 cities around the world so far. He also mentioned the work of the FIA High Level Panel for Road Safety, a high-level consultative group which gathers decision-makers from the economic world, international organisations, non-governmental organisations in order to encourage innovation and put in place concrete measures. Finally, he pointed out his main achievements as UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Road Safety since April 2015, particularly the drafting and adoption of an ambitious resolution which opens the way to the creation of a UN global fund for Road Safety and his efforts to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Secondly, Jean Todt made a few suggestions for measures to be taken at the European level to improve road safety. He highlighted the importance of reviewing the regulations on general vehicle safety at the beginning of 2018 and commended the progress made in recent years: the new European driving licence introduced in January 2013, the directive relating to the cross-border application of legislation (which came into effect in May 2015), the new legislative measures on technical checks which help to reduce the number of accidents caused by technical defects (adopted in April 2014); the obligation for all vehicles to be equipped with the eCall system…

Lastly, Jean Todt insisted on the role Europe can play to help other regions of the world, in particular the Southern countries, to reduce inequalities and use road safety as a lever for development. He suggested that road safety be taken into account as one of the factors for calculating the HDI, the Human Development Index, which was created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990 to assess the level of human development of countries around the world.

You can read his full speech here:

- English version

- French version