United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called for urgent reform of the UN Security Council, describing the continued exclusion of Africa from permanent representation on the 15-member body as “unjust and indefensible.”
Guterres made the call on Tuesday while opening the General Debate of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York.
With about 100 days remaining in his tenure, the UN chief said many of the world’s major crises were linked to how political and economic power was distributed and exercised.
He said the composition of the Security Council no longer reflected contemporary geopolitical realities and reiterated the need for reform to make the body more representative.
Guterres also highlighted the growing gap between global wealth and the millions of people who continue to lack adequate food, clean water, education and healthcare.
He argued that the issue was not merely economic but also concerned access to opportunities and resources.
The secretary-general criticised the international financial system for placing developing countries under heavy debt burdens while they simultaneously confront climate-related disasters they contributed relatively little to causing.
He called for faster debt relief, stronger multilateral development banks and fairer access to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights.
On global conflicts, including those in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar, Guterres said many ceasefires had failed to provide lasting peace, describing them as little more than “lesser fires” while civilians continued to bear the consequences.
On the Gaza conflict, he renewed his call for compliance with orders of the International Court of Justice and warned that continued settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank threatened the prospects of a two-state solution.
Guterres also condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the UN Charter.
Turning to climate change, the UN chief described it as the “most profound intergenerational power imbalance” and warned that the world was approaching a likely breach of the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold.
He called for polluters to pay and urged developed countries to triple adaptation funding for vulnerable nations.
Guterres noted that profits recorded by major oil companies since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had far exceeded the amount of global adaptation finance available to developing countries.
On artificial intelligence, he warned that power was becoming increasingly concentrated in data, computing capacity and algorithms, while international regulation was struggling to keep pace with technological development.
“The danger is not technology,” he said. “The danger is technology without accountability.”
The UN secretary-general called for the creation of a multilateral framework for managing AI risks, backed by independent oversight.
He said children should never be used as test subjects for unregulated artificial intelligence systems and argued that decisions involving life and death should not be handed over to machines.
“Killer robots must have no place in our future,” Guterres said.
