On December 12, the former Portuguese premier Antonio Guterres was sworn in as new UN secretary general. Guterres, 67, replaced in this office the 72-year-old Ban Ki-moon who had been at the head of this organization since January 2007. Guterres was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 until 2002. In 2005 he was appointed the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and held this office until 2015. As the UN high commissioner, Guterres was calling on governments of the most developed and affluent countries to allot more funds for those who suffered from conflicts and natural disasters.
Guterres pointed out in a speech to the UN General Assembly that the organization had been promoting peace on Earth for decades, but now it was struggling to fulfill this task.
“The UN must be ready to change,” Guterres said. “Our most serious shortcoming – and here I refer to the entire international community – is our inability to prevent crises. The United Nations was born from war. Today we must be here for peace. The goal of my work at the UN will be to win this trust, and I will be doing my utmost to serve to the benefit of humankind,” he emphasized.
Guterres then highlighted three strategic priorities for his five-year term that begins on January 1, 2017: working for peace, supporting sustainable development, and reforming the UN internal management.
Noting that, often, the UN is tasked with peacekeeping in places where there is no peace to keep, he said that a greater conceptual clarity and a shared understanding of the scope of peacekeeping was needed so as to pave the way for urgent reforms.
“Inspired by the new concept of sustaining peace, it is time for us all to engage in a comprehensive reform of the UN strategy, operational set-up, and structures for peace and security,” he highlighted.
On the second key element of the reform agenda – achieving the sustainable development goals, Guterres said that development will form the centre of the UN’s work, and that he will engage in a comprehensive reform of the UN development system – both at headquarters and at country levels. He said this must involve leadership, coordination, delivery and accountability, and underlined the need to bring humanitarian and development spheres closer together from the very beginning of a crisis.
“Humanitarian response, sustainable development, and sustaining peace are three sides of the same triangle,” he highlighted.
On management reforms, Mr. Guterres underlined the need to build on existing efforts and to implement recent reform initiatives. In his words, the UN needs to be nimble, efficient and effective. It must focus more on delivery and less on process; more on people and less on bureaucracy.
“Looking at UN staff and budgetary rules and regulations, one might think some of them were designed to prevent, rather than enable, the effective delivery of our mandates,” he said, adding: “It benefits no one if it takes nine months to deploy a staff member to the field,” Guterres said. In his opinion, the UN also needs a substantial reform of its communications strategy, upgrading its tools and platforms to reach people around the world.
Concluding his remarks, the newly-elected secretary general said that while the world is getting better connected, fragmentations within societies are increasing, and that more and more people are living within their own bubbles, unable to appreciate their links with the whole human family.
“In the end, it comes down to values, as was said so many times today. We want the world our children inherit to be defined by the values enshrined in the UN Charter: peace, justice, respect, human rights, tolerance, and solidarity,” Guterres said. “The threats to these values are most often based on fear. Our duty to the peoples we serve is to work together to move from fear of each other, to trust in each other. Trust in the values that bind us, and trust in the institutions that serve and protect us,” he emphasized.
“PERMANENT MEMBERS OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL BEAR THE GREATEST RESPONSIBILITY”
Oleksandr MOTSYK, ex-Ambassador of Ukraine to the US, Kyiv:
“Guterres is an experienced politician who wields a great deal of clout in international affairs. And, to be a successful secretary general, he is supposed to address any problems in the world of today on the basis of the UN Charter. It is, first of all, maintaining peace and countering aggression, and, secondly, further strengthening the international law.
“As Russia blocks all the resolutions aimed at resolving conflicts in the world, including the aggression against Ukraine and the situation in Syria, the new secretary general’s mission will be to work on strengthening the international law. In this context, we are pinning major hopes on his term in office.
“Guterres’s statement about a clearer conceptual definition of peacekeeping should be interpreted as follows: what comes first is the will of the member states themselves, with the permanent members of the Security Council bearing the greatest responsibility in maintaining peace. In this context, it is necessary to work out and adopt a mechanism which would debar a permanent Security Council member state from participating in settling a situation if this state itself constitutes a problem and has a conflict of interests.
“In the vast majority of instances, UN SC’s efforts are ineffective because a member, in this case Russia, intervenes and blocks resolutions in a situation when it is a party to the conflict.
“As a non-permanent Security Council member, Ukraine works rather effectively in this body. For example, it moved a resolution to condemn the recent terrorist act in Turkey, which left a lot of people dead.
“As for Ukraine’s tasks for 2017, it is very important to continue making efforts to settle the situation caused by the Russian aggression. I mean restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and achievement of a durable peace in Ukraine.
“There have been many proposals that a permanent UN SC member state, which is involved in a conflict, should voluntarily refuse to take part in a vote, but this remains wishful thinking. In practice, it will be difficult to make this kind of changes in the UN Charter.
“I once was a representative in the UN task force that drew up amendments to the UN Charter about reforming the Security Council. It was in 1992-95. Now, 20 years later, we are broaching this question again, and the situation remains unchanged. But this does not mean that this problem should be left unattended.
“Guterres was right to note that we must work on confidence-building as a UN postulate for solving the problems of common concern. It is easier to resolve any problems on a bilateral level when there is trust. And, on the contrary, if there is no trust, this creates a situation of stupor. In this case, we should work further, knowing that it is much more comfortable to live in an atmosphere of trust than in that of fear.”
