Vision for the United Nations
Renewing the United Nations.
The United Nations turns eighty this year. An institution can be indispensable and in need of renewal at the same time, and ours is both. This is a program of renewal, begun on the first day, resting on five commitments.
Forty years ago, in a basement in Beirut, I made a promise that if my children were spared I would devote my life to peace. The work I would bring to the United Nations is the continuation of that vow, on the largest possible scale. The authority of this office rests on one foundation, independence: the Secretary-General serves the whole of the membership, and no government, no bloc and no ideology. It is precisely because I am willing to speak candidly with each of them that I can be trusted by all of them.
The program of renewal
Five commitments, begun on day one.
- IA United Nations that keeps the peaceThe Charter's first purpose is to maintain peace, and it is where the UN now most visibly struggles, with more state-based conflicts active than at any time since 1946 while prevention and mediation stay starved of funding. I learned the craft of peace in the process that ended the Ecuador-Peru war, settled in Brasilia in 1998 through a patient, guarantor-backed method that has rarely been applied to the hardest conflicts elsewhere. It can be.What she will doRebalance the UN toward prevention and place mediation and good offices on stable footing, using the office to travel where the wars are; assemble small groups of trusted guarantor states to accompany each major process from first contact to final verification; and make Resolution 2719 real by funding the first regionally-led peace operation without further delay.
- IIA Security Council worthy of the 21st centuryThe Council was designed for fifty-one states and now serves nearly two hundred, with entire regions that account for most of humanity holding no permanent seat. That imbalance is the principal reason it so often fails to act. No renewal of the UN can be credible while the Council remains frozen in 1945.What she will doChampion the principle, not the personalities: permanent representation for the regions history has left out across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, and an end to a veto that turns the Council from an instrument of action into a venue for paralysis. The choice of which nations hold new seats belongs to the membership, but silence on a question this central is itself a choice, and I will not be silent.
- IIIDevelopment and a fairer fiscal worldFewer than a fifth of the Sustainable Development Goals are on track, and the deepest cause is financial. One developing country in three now spends more on debt interest than on the health or education of its people, and the financing gap stands at roughly four trillion dollars a year. I bring a record here, not only a position: I led the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, and Ecuador went on to complete the largest debt-for-nature conversion in history.What she will doMake the reform of unsustainable debt a standing priority of the office; turn UN development work toward enabling national and local delivery, measured by what a country can sustain on its own; and champion a fairer financial architecture, scaling innovative instruments from debt-for-nature conversions to blended finance.
- IVThe dignity of the human personPeace rests on the dignity of the person, and that dignity now reaches into domains the founders could not have imagined. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology and the digital economy are remaking work, warfare and the body itself, shaped today by a handful of states and companies largely without the world's consent. Climate change, meanwhile, drives the security and survival of hundreds of millions, most of them in nations that did least to cause the harm.What she will doDefend the independence of the UN's human-rights work and the people who carry it out; make the UN the credible convener on AI and the new technologies, building on the Global Digital Compact; bring young people into the institution as a matter of legitimacy; and pursue a climate agenda that respects both the science and the livelihoods of ordinary people, giving adaptation the weight it has long been denied.
- VA United Nations renewed from withinThe UN has become slow, fragmented and expensive in ways no serious government or enterprise would tolerate, its Secretariat carrying more than forty thousand accumulated mandates and a thicket of overlapping bodies, now compounded by an acute liquidity crisis. A renewal driven by a cash crisis is not the same as one driven by a vision, and cuts made under pressure too often fall on the wrong things.What she will doTreat mandate discipline as a permanent function, with a sunset clause and a clear measure for every recurring mandate; consolidate back-office functions across the system while protecting mandates that are genuinely distinct; and make the Organization's finances transparent and its performance measurable, while telling every capital plainly that member states must pay what they owe, in full and on time.
The documents
Read it in full.
The official Vision Statement submitted to Member States, and the full curriculum vitae, in line with the selection process's transparency standards.
“Where others speak of reform, I speak of renewal, pursued with the speed, the honesty and the appetite for results the world has a right to expect.”Ambassador A-Baki