UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called for Security Council reform, saying that the continued absence of permanent African representation on the body was “unjust and indefensible.”
Guterres spoke at the opening of the General Debate of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York.
With about 100 days left in his term, he framed the world’s major crises as expressions of a single struggle over how power is exercised and by whom.
He said the 15-member Security Council’s composition no longer reflected today’s geopolitical realities and repeated his call for reform.
On inequality, he said the gap between record global wealth and the billions still lacking food, clean water, education, and healthcare was a question of power over opportunity and resources, not just economics.
Guterres again criticised the international financial system for leaving developing nations burdened by debt, as they face climate disasters they did little to cause.
He called for faster debt relief, stronger multilateral development banks and fairer access to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights.
The UN secretary-general announced the UN had achieved full gender parity across senior leadership, headquarters staff and professional roles for the first time in its history.
“Equality is not a dream; it is a decision,” he said, citing the UN’s progress as evidence that entrenched power structures can change.
He said a decade of eroding international norms, including attacks on civilians and humanitarian workers, and the sidelining of international law, showed power was being reshaped globally.
“The fault lines in our world are widening,” he said. “Cracks have become canyons.”
The UN chief called for stronger multilateral cooperation built on shared rules, warning against a slide into rival blocs with separate economic and security systems, a scenario he has previously called the “Great Fracture.”
On conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar, Guterres said many so-called ceasefires had amounted to little more than “lesser fires,” with civilians bearing the cost.
He renewed calls for compliance with International Court of Justice orders on Gaza, warning that settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank threatened to extinguish the two-state solution.
He also condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the UN Charter.
On climate change, Guterres called it the “most profound intergenerational power imbalance” and warned the world was near certain to breach the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold.
The UN secretary-general called for polluters to pay and for developed nations to triple adaptation funding, noting major oil companies’ profits since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine far exceeded global adaptation finance for developing countries.
On artificial intelligence, he warned that power was increasingly concentrated in data, computing capacity and algorithms, advancing faster than the world’s ability to govern it.
“The danger is not technology,” he said. “The danger is technology without accountability.”
The UN chief called for a multilateral AI risk-management framework with independent oversight, saying children must never be test subjects for unregulated systems and that life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines.
“Killer robots must have no place in our future,” he said.
Guterres reaffirmed peace, development and human rights as inseparable pillars of the UN Charter, and said the UN was founded more than 80 years ago, after World War II, as an act of defiance and hope by nations that recognised their futures were bound together.
He pledged to sustain the Charter’s values through the remainder of his term and beyond.
“The world does not need a weaker United Nations,” he said.
“It needs a UN strong enough to face the world as it is and determined enough to build the world as it should be,” he added.
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