Guterres urges leaders to reform UNSC, global bodies as world has changed

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged world leaders to reform multilateral institutions, including the Security Council and international financial architecture based on current economic and political realities as the General Assembly opened its 78th session.

"Global governance is stuck in time. Look no further than the United Nations Security Council and the Bretton Woods system. They reflect the political and economic realities of 1945," Guterres said on Tuesday.

"The world has changed. Our institutions have not. We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions don’t reflect the world as it is," he told the world's biggest diplomatic gathering at UN headquarters in New York.

He warned that the world is inching closer to a ''Great Fracture'' in economic and financial systems, and trade relations with geopolitical tensions are rising. ''The alternative to reform is further fragmentation. It’s reform or rupture,'' he said.

'Snapshot of injustice'

Addressing pressing issues the world is facing from climate crisis to wars, nuclear threats, natural disasters, inequalities and hunger, he said: "If we don’t feed the hungry, we are feeding conflict."

"Despite our long list of global challenges, that same spirit of determination can guide us forward. Let us be determined to heal divisions and forge peace,'' he added.

Guterres also called a flood that killed thousands in Derna, Libya a symbol of the world's ills.

"Even as we speak now, bodies are washing ashore from the same Mediterranean Sea where billionaires sunbathe on their super yachts," Guterres said.

"Derna is a sad snapshot of the state of our world - the flood of inequity, of injustice, of inability to confront the challenges in our midst."