Your Excellencies, distinguished honoree Ambassador Carmelita R. Salas, UNFPA Country Representative Suneeta Mukherjee and fellow RH advocates, good evening:

It was a Filipino who pioneered and concretized the import of realizing the “crucial links between population and development and the need to take population factors into account in development plans.”

This Filipino was Rafael Montinola Salas, the first Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund when it was initially known as the United Nations Fund for Population Activities. He served the UNFPA as Executive Director since it became operational in 1969 until his death on March 3, 1987 – a long period of 18 years.

UN Under-Secretary General Rafael Salas is the late husband of our distinguished honoree tonight, Ambassador Carmelita R. Salas who has sustained the advocacy of her illustrious husband.

Rafael Salas headed the Philippine delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights held in Tehran from April to May 1968 wherein he was elected Vice President. This Conference institutionalized family planning as a fundamental human right when it proclaimed that: “parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children.”

Population experts acknowledge him as one of the few figures who “transformed the obscure field of family planning into an accepted component of developmental science.”

The efforts of Mr. Salas to create global awareness and consensus about the significance of population to social and economic development earned him the enviable title of “Mr. Population”.

It was my singular fortune to have been under the tutelage of Professor Salas in the UP College of Law. He gave me my first work as a legal officer in the Legal Department of the Office of the Philippine President when he was Executive Secretary. I am a member of a select group known as the “Salas Boys”.

It is indeed regrettably unfortunate and lamentably embarrassing that Mr. Salas’s own Philippines has not consistently responded to his advocacy and until now the Philippine Congress is yet to enact a nationwide, comprehensive, rights-based and adequately funded law on reproductive health, family planning and population development.

History documents that it takes time to vanquish obscurantism, particularly that which is fomented by an organized religious hierarchy and assisted by a sector in the legislature.

But at the end of the struggle, progressive measures invariably and eventually triumph. This is the arduous saga of the companion reproductive health bills in the House of Representatives and in the Senate.

With the steadfast support of RH advocates, kindred NGOs, the overwhelming endorsement of the Filipino public and the unwavering majority of the members of Congress, I am certain that the forthcoming Third Regular Session of the 14th Congress will witness the fruition of our relentless efforts for the approval of the RH bills.

Thank you all for your invaluable assistance and dedicated commitment to our crusade. We shall prevail. And we assure Ambassador Carmelita Salas that we shall secure justice and achieve fulfillment of the pioneering heritage of Rafael Montinola Salas on the inevitable nexus between population and sustainable human development.