The Secretary General of the UN proposed this Tuesday, at the beginning of the 78th period of sessions of the General Assembly, “to renew international institutions of the 21st century” that are based “on equity, solidarity and universality.”
In a world gangrenous by divisions – between economic and military powers, between north and south, and between east and west – there is no alternative but to reform these institutions, otherwise we will go to “greater fragmentation.” “, he warned, although he acknowledged that it will not be easy because “the reforms are a question of power.”
Guterres began with his speech a High Level Week marked by the continuation of the war in Ukraine, which has exacerbated political tensions and deepened economic differences between the countries.
Among those attending was the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, who is attending the General Assembly for the first time and will speak later; For its part, Russia was represented today simply by its ambassador to the UN, waiting for the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, to arrive in the coming days.
Guterres began by recognizing that the current institutions – the UN itself, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund – were born in 1945 and respond to a time when a large part of the current countries lived under colonial yoke.
“The world has changed; our institutions have not,” he summarized, and that is why they are not contributing to solving the problem of growing divisions, which do not occur only between countries or blocs, but within the democracies themselves, where “the authoritarianism is on the rise.
The Portuguese politician cited the multiple points on the planet where serious multidimensional crises are being experienced – the Sahel, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Burma, Palestine or Syria – which, together with natural disasters, demonstrate that “the system global humanitarian crisis is on the verge of collapse.
Millennium Goals as medicine against inequality
Next, Guterres recalled that inequality is the gasoline of all discontent: “If we do not feed the hungry, we are fueling conflict,” he said, and recalled that the best weapon against conflict is to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ).
In this sense, he asked the countries for three immediately achievable commitments: commit $500 billion a year to implement these SDGs in poor countries – which spend more on paying their debt than on health -; change the structure of multilateral development banks and devise mechanisms to alleviate the debt of the most affected countries.
He did not forget to mention the climate goals, and contrasted the fact that the most industrialized G20 countries are responsible for 80% of carbon emissions, while the Africans, despite having 60% of the planet’s solar capacity, only receive the 2% of investments in renewable energy.
Guterres also alluded to gender inequalities, recalling that in many countries women “continue to expect equal opportunities or equal pay, or even equality before the law, (as they expect) for their work to be valued and their opinions to count.”
“Across the globe,” she lamented, “women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive, are being suppressed or reduced, and women’s freedoms are being restricted.”
Finally, he launched a call to make Artificial Intelligence a tool for access to knowledge and not for citizen control, which will require global organizations to supervise its development and application.
EFE
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