(VOVWORLD) - The UN General Assembly opened its 79th session on Tuesday, stressing its determination to reform and take bolder action to deal with growing challenges to peace, security, the environment, and global governance.
 The 79th session of UN General Assembly (photo: UN) |
A year of turmoil
In the closing speech of the UN General Assembly’s 78th session, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed that the international community has experienced a tumultuous year of continued poverty, inequality, conflict, and the hottest temperatures on record.
The Hamas-Israel conflict broke out in the Gaza Strip last October and is still going. The conflict in Ukraine is about to enter its third year. The civil war in Sudan, the riots in Haiti, and imminent conflicts in many other parts of the world have put heavy pressure on the UN to maintain peace and security.
Dennis Francis, President of UNGA 78 said the damage caused by humans around the world in the past year is beyond imagining. The UN is being forced to reform in order to cope with exceedingly complex challenges.
“This organization was forged in the fires of two cataclysmic wars, with a solemn vow to spare future generations from the scourge of war. The United Nations must rise to meet this challenge and fulfill its mandate to maintain international peace and security – as conflicts proliferate from Ukraine to Haiti, from the Middle East to Africa,” said Francis.
Francis urged countries to work with the UN to fulfill its central responsibility of building sustainable peace and security, while handling new security challenges like climate change, technology inequality, and risks from AI. He warned that if the world continues on its current trajectory, millions more will face poverty and hunger by 2030 and the world will be far off track in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.
UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres said countries must share a determination to achieve the ambitious development goals adopted within the UN framework. He recalled that the 78th General Assembly endorsed the landmark political declarations adopted by leaders at the SDG Summit last September. He said achieving the 17 SDGs serves the interests of all countries and they need to see this as a platform for dialogue and avoid pushing the international system into a collapse.
“The UN, and the multilateral system itself, can only be as effective as member states’ commitment allows. The challenges facing humanity are not insurmountable if we work together,” said Guterres.
 UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres calls for international cooperation to handle challenges. (Photo: Reuters) |
Reform and advance to the future
According to UN leaders, the two most important tasks of UNGA 79 are to reform the UN and shape the world's common future through the Summit of the Future to be held on September 22-23 at the UN headquarters in New York, just before the UNGA 79 High-Level Week scheduled to start on September 24.
At the Summit of the Future, the UN is expected to adopt three important documents – the Future Compact, the Global Digital Compact, and the Declaration on Future Generations.
“The idea of the Summit of the Future is to render the United Nations a multilateral system more effective in the fulfillment of its mandate, to make it more participatory, more networked. This, in the face of the very clear global challenges that we face. The fact that the world has changed and is changing rapidly, and the reality that many of our governance structures date back to the creation of the United Nations,” Guy Ryder, UN Under-Secretary-General for Policy, said.
The biggest issue is changing the number of members and the voting mechanism of the Security Council, the most powerful body in the UN, which now has five permanent members with veto power (the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China).
Prior to UNGA 79, many countries, international organizations, and UN leaders, including the UN Secretary-General, called for increasing the number of permanent Security Council members to more accurately reflect the current world order and give more power to developing countries in the UN decision-making apparatus, specifically, giving one or more permanent seats to Africa.
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the US supports the idea. “In addition to non-permanent membership for African countries, the United States supports creating two permanent seats for Africa on the Council. It’s what our African partners seek, and this is what we believe is just.”
Besides Africa, countries like India, Japan, Brazil, and Germany have also been supported for a permanent seat on the Council. Changing the Council’s voting mechanism to limit the power of the veto will be difficult, due to strong opposition by some of the permanent members.