UN chief Guterres to back BRICS role in reflecting new multipolar realities
United Nations: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will be coming to the BRICS summit in New Delhi with a message of support for the group that reflects the changed multipolar realities of today’s world, according to his Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.
Guterres is “expected to note that today’s economic, demographic, and geopolitical realities are not those of 1945, and that countries represented at the summits speak for that changing reality” when he speaks at the summit on Sunday, he said on Wednesday (local time).
The present global political and economic systems are locked in the post-World War II framework created in 1945, when many international institutions were created.
In his speech on “Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability Shaping the Future for Inclusive Global Growth”, Guterres is “expected to underscore that multipolarity can help bring balance to global systems and institutions”, Dujarric said.
“But this requires forming multilateral institutions, reforming multilateral institutions, including the Bretton Woods system, the Security Council, among others, to reflect today’s realities”, he is expected to say.
The Bretton Woods system serves as the foundation of the global monetary system and underpins the International Monetary Fund that was created under it, and other global financial organisations.
As the chair of the summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set ‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability’ as the meeting’s theme.
Dujarric said Guterres is expected to have bilateral meetings with PM Modi and other leaders at the summit of the ten-member BRICS.
Among the leaders slated to attend the summit are Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China.
They and PM Modi will not be at the UN high-level meeting this month, and Guterres’ visit to Delhi may be one of his last opportunities to meet them before his term as UN leader ends in December.
The UN, paralysed by divisions in the Security Council, has not been able to end the two major conflicts, the Iran conflict and the Ukraine war, that have far-reaching consequences, even eroding the UN’s sustainable development goals and threatening food security in many parts of the world.
Leaders of two Gulf adversaries, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, are expected to be there.
This will be Guterres’s fifth visit to India and his second this year after participating in the India-AI summit in February.