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United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks to delegates during a meeting on Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at UN headquarters in New York City, US, April 27, 2026. REUTERS
UNITED NATIONS:
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made a final appeal for global cooperation on Tuesday, calling for a “world built on interdependence” as he delivered his last address to the UN General Assembly before leaving office at the end of the year.
With roughly 100 days remaining in his decade-long tenure, Guterres said the world’s crises were linked to a broader struggle over how power is
exercised and by whom. “The greatest power is not the power to dominate. It is the power to build a future that
works for everyone,” he said.
Warning that “cracks have become canyons”, the secretary-general said international norms had eroded as civilians and humanitarian workers were killed, international law was disregarded and trust between nations weakened.
He warned against a “Great Fracture” in which rival blocs develop separate economic and security systems, urging countries instead to strengthen cooperation and shared rules. He said the international system was struggling against the present-day challenges to the world.
Turning to major conflicts, Guterres renewed calls for compliance with International Court of Justice orders regarding Gaza and warned that Israeli settlement expansion in the 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.
Guterres called for reform of the Security Council, describing the continued absence of permanent African representation as “unjust and indefensible”. On inequality, he urged faster debt relief for developing countries, stronger multilateral development banks and fairer access to IMF Special Drawing Rights.
On artificial intelligence, Guterres called for international safeguards, warning that “life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines” and that “killer robots must have no place in our future”.
Concluding his farewell address, Guterres pledged to continue defending the UN Charter’s principles. “The world does not need a weaker United Nations,” he said. “It needs a UN strong enough to face the world as it is.”
