Arab News | As new session opens at UN, outgoing and incoming leaders warn it will erode without reform

NEW YORK: The UN closed the books on the 80th session of the General Assembly on Tuesday and opened the 81st in a single day of ceremony, amid warnings from its outgoing and incoming leadership that the world body must reform itself or face erosion.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was addressing the assembly for what he noted was his final time as UN chief, painted a bleak picture of the present moment in the world: wars that carry a risk of nuclear escalation; worsening climate chaos; advances in artificial intelligence without adequate governance; and human suffering that is intensifying even as aid funding has been slashed.

“Geopolitical mistrust and suspicion continue to block the effective solutions we need — and erode people’s faith in the possibilities of global cooperation,” Guterres said.

Still, he told delegates, he has “enormous hope,” pointing in particular to the UN’s Pact for the Future and the UN80 reform initiative as “a blueprint for action, solutions and bold reforms.”

The UN80 Initiative is a reform drive launched by Guterres in March last year, the organization’s 80th anniversary. It aims to overhaul overlapping structures and outdated mandates that officials say have rendered the UN slow and bureaucratic.

The departing president of the General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock, described the initiative as unfinished business that she and her successor, Khalilur Rahman, were carrying into the 81st session.

Baerbock described the 80th session one that had found itself at “a crossroads” over whether a handful of states could effectively impose a veto on the General Assembly’s consensus. Member states, she said, had answered by refusing “to allow compromise to become compromising,” by pushing through 317 resolutions, holding 116 plenary meetings and opening a new chapter on AI governance, despite the challenges and only a few processes concluding through consensus.

“Not a single day, not a single country would be better off without the United Nations,” Baerbock told the assembly as she rejected the argument that the body had become irrelevant.

She credited Guterres with forcing the question of reform onto the agenda through the UN80 Initiative, including cuts to mandates and a merger of the UN System Staff College, which provides personnel and partners with the knowledge, skills and tools to act collaboratively and effectively, with UN Institute for Training and Research.

“If we are not capable of freeing this organization from overlapping structures and mandates, as well as a heavy bureaucratic mentality, it will erode over time,” she warned, describing the upcoming selection of a new secretary-general, a process she formally handed over to her successor, as “the credibility test of this institution for this decade.”

Rahman was then sworn in. He is from Bangladesh and told reporters he intended to run an open, media-engaged presidency built around the theme “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation.”

During his formal address to the assembly he lamented that the UN “has often fallen short of the expectations placed upon us,” citing in particular a “widening trust deficit” that member states must work to close through the delivery of results, not rhetoric.

“Trust cannot simply be requested, it must be earned,” he added.

Rahman outlined six priorities for the coming 12-month session: peacekeeping-driven conflict prevention; acceleration of the Sustainable Development Goals, with just four years left to achieve them and only 36 percent of targets on track; climate adaptation ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference, COP31, in November, and a high-level meeting this month on rising sea levels; human rights, including the anniversaries of the Durban Declaration to combat racism and other forms of discrimination and intolerance, and the Declaration on the Right to Development, an issue he described as personal, given that Bangladesh hosts more than a million displaced Rohingya; inclusive governance of AI; and institutional solvency, as he appealed to member states to pay their assessed dues “in full, on time and without conditions.”

Rahman also inherits oversight of the selection process for the next secretary-general, under Article 97 of the UN Charter, to replace Guterres, whose term ends on Dec. 31. He pledged to run it “fairly, inclusively and transparently,” alongside the Security Council.

He said he had built his office to reflect the opening words of the Charter — “We the peoples,” not “We the states” — and noted that women make up 60 percent of his cabinet.

Guterres closed the day with a separate, more somber commemoration: a wreath-laying ceremony for Dag Hammarskjold, the second secretary-general of the UN, who was killed in the course of his duties, along with 15 others, in plane crash on Sept. 18, 1961.

Citing a new report from investigator Mohammed Chande Othman, Guterres renewed his appeal for undisclosed records relating to the crash in what is now Zambia, and said he would soon send recommendations to the General Assembly.

He also noted that UN personnel had been killed “in record numbers” over the past three years and added: “Their sacrifice reminds us of all the women and men who have lost their lives while serving the United Nations.”