Mr Chairman, Prime Minister, I bring you the apologies of my Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, whose thoughts are with you and who would have wished to be with you if he had not had his duties today in Parliament. On behalf of Mr Blair and on behalf of all your guests, can I say this conference is a credit to Sweden. I congratulate you and your government on the vision of calling us together on the eve of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau to remember the terror of the Holocaust but also to commit ourselves never to forget the awful warning of what happens when we deny the common humanity of all races and all faiths.

This is a fitting date for another reason. This week's set reading from the torah in all Jewish households is of the 10 Commandments, a text which brings together both Jews and Christians around the same common moral code, a code which affirms the sanctity of human life and commands us to live in harmony with our neighbours and which also commands us that 'thou shall not bear false witness'.

The gravest form of false witness is to deny the full horror of the Holocaust. We must ensure that those who peddle that lie are exposed and defeated. The least we owe the millions of the victims of the Shoah is to be frank and honest about their fate. What has brought us together today is our resolve that never again must the events of the Holocaust be repeated. The best way we can ensure that they never again happen is to never forget their full horror.

We remember it in respect for victims of the Shoah but we do it also for ourselves. We live in societies that are democratic, free and broadly tolerant. If we want to keep them that way we must constantly educate our young people in the evil of Nazism and remind them that all of society is diminished and corroded by the poison of persecution. Ignorance is the breeding ground of suspicion, hostility and racial hatred. Knowledge is our best weapon against the revival of Nazi ideas or against the rise of political parties who seek support by seeking our new scapegoats among communities of different ethnic identity.

We must share the awful warning of the Holocaust with each new generation of our children. That is why today Tony Blair has announced that the 27th January will every year be commemorated in Britain as Holocaust Memorial Day not just in memory of the victims of the Holocaust alone but also in memory of all the victims of genocide but I would share with you a challenge we face:

How do we make real to each generation of children the incomprehensible events of the Holocaust which they themselves could not have witnessed? It is easy to convey it in terms of the numbers, easy but dangerous because to do so is to fall into the same crime as the Nazis themselves to whom each victim was only a number; each victim was also a human with hopes, with talents and fears. Some of you will have visited the children's museum in Prague, a memorial to the children who died from the ghetto in Prague in the concentration camps. In the concentration camp to which most of them were taken there was a remarkable and inspirational art teacher who in the few months that those children survived before being killed helped them to express themselves by painting. On the walls of that small room are the paintings of the children of the camps and of their memories of their homes and each painting has their name and each painting has the date when they were gassed. It is a profoundly moving experience because it brings home to you that each of those who died were humans who had their own form of self-expression and who left behind that note for the rest of us.

The challenge to us is to find ways in which we express that human dimension of the cruelty and the suffering to our new generation of children. This June, in Britain we will open a permanent Holocaust Exhibition based in one of our largest museums in London; it has been four years in the making and will be one of the largest exhibitions on the subject. It is our hope that it will bring home the truth of the past by bringing it alive for the generations of today.

But this, of course, is a conference as much about the future as about the past. On this day when we remember the past, we must pledge ourselves to oppose racism and xenophobia wherever they arise to assert that all mankind, irrespective of race, of faith, of colour, shares the same common humanity, is of the same equal worth and has the same universal right to a life of dignity, respect and security and we must build a future not only of tolerance within countries but also of peace between nations.

I salute Ehud Barak for his courage in breathing life back into the peace process. All of us here wish him and his partners in the peace process success in finding a just and lasting solution that will give all the peoples of the Middle East, including the survivors of the Shoah, a secure future in their own lands.

Some of us here have visited those lands and have had the honour to rekindle the lamp of remembrance at Yad Vashem. Our task today is to make sure that we hold up that lamp to be seen by the children of all our countries, to make sure it is kindled in their hearts and their minds as the best guarantee that their generations and generations yet to come will never have to witness such appalling events again. Let us make that the goal of this remarkable conference. 26 January 2000