Secretary-General Urges Group of 20 Nations to Drive Security Council, Financial System Reforms

Following are UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks to a session on reform of global governance institutions at the Group of 20 (G20) Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, today:

We face a global governance deficit and a global trust deficit. Poverty, inequalities, and the climate crisis are getting worse, and peace is getting further out of reach.

We need global solutions rooted in the UN Charter.  But our institutions are not keeping up.  That was the reason for the Pact for the Future agreed in the UN Summit of the Future to strengthen multilateralism and global governance.

Starting with the Security Council, which is steadily losing its effectiveness and legitimacy.  As wars grind on, innocent people are paying a terrible price, and the Security Council is unable to stop them.  Security Council reform must be pursued with determination and not become a mirage.

Everywhere around the world, peace requires actions grounded in the values of the UN Charter, the rule of law, UN resolutions and the principles of sovereignty, political independence and the territorial integrity of States.

As the world’s largest economies, many of you set the rules that dominate the boards of global financial institutions.  The world looks to you to act on the Pact’s commitments to accelerate reform of the international financial architecture that has become outdated and unfair.

And the decisions are yours.  To make it representative of today’s world and not of the world of many decades ago.  To give fair representation to developing countries in the governance of international financial institutions.

To adequately and equitably shield economies — particularly vulnerable ones — from global shocks, making sure that we reestablish a real global safety net.  And to mobilize finance at scale to close the Sustainable Development Goals financing gap, including substantially increasing the capital and the lending capacity of the multilateral development banks, making them bigger and bolder.  And to boost concessional funding, taking into account vulnerability and not only gross domestic product (GDP).

And at the same time, to make debt relief work and work timely and effectively for those countries drowning in debt, while reviewing the debt architecture to enable countries to borrow with confidence.  And finally, to build a more inclusive and equitable international tax system.  July’s Conference on Financing for Development in Spain is an opportunity to deepen these reforms.

The Global Digital Compact adopted in the UN Summit of the Future includes the first universal agreement on artificial intelligence (AI) governance that brings every country to the table.  It calls for an independent international scientific panel on AI and initiating a global dialogue on its governance within the United Nations.  And it requests options for innovative voluntary financing for AI capacity-building in developing countries within the next year.

I urge the G20 countries to lead, and once again, I repeat — many of these decisions are exclusively in the hands of members of G20 countries and their presence in the governance bodies of most of our institutions.

With the Security Council, I know it will be more difficult, but we must persist.  And we must make sure that we support the necessary reforms of global governance because they are absolutely essential to rebuild trust in today’s world.