Guterres: reforming United Nations requires ‘painful‘ changes

Reforming the UN requires "painful" changes, warns António Guterres. Keystone-SDA

The process launched to make the United Nations more effective will require painful changes, the Secretary General has warned, insisting on the need for these reforms. Staff cuts will be inevitable.

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In March, António Guterres launched the “UN80” initiative aimed at improving the efficiency of the United Nations, which is facing chronic budgetary constraints reinforced by the policies of US President Donald Trump.

“Our common goal has always been to make our organisation more efficient, to simplify procedures, to eliminate duplication and to strengthen transparency and accountability,” he said on Monday as he presented the progress of this work to the member states.

“The liquidity crisis we are facing is not new. But the current financial and political situation makes our efforts even more urgent,” he said. “We know that some of these changes will be painful for our UN family.”

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Mergers mooted

He cited as an example the proposed restructuring within the Secretariat of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Political Affairs, some of whose units could be “merged”.

“I think we will be able to cut 20% of the posts in the two departments,” and this figure “should be seen as a benchmark” for the entire UN80 initiative, said Guterres. The Secretariat that he heads will employ some 35,000 people by the end of 2023.

He also mentioned the possibility of relocating posts from New York and Geneva to less expensive cities, and highlighted the overload of tasks entrusted to the Secretariat by the member states, with “more than 3,600 mandates” identified during this process.

“It is as if we have allowed formalism and the quantity of meetings and reports to become an end in itself,” he said, insisting that “people’s needs must be our guide”.

Structural changes

In this context, he recalled that some of the decisions depended on the member states, whom he called on to have the courage to make even “difficult” choices.

A few days ago, in a memo seen by AFP, the internal working group responsible for the UN80 initiative had suggested some major reforms, in particular the merger of certain UN agencies.

Guterres did not mention these ideas directly, but he did indicate that groups of agencies working on the same themes would be proposing reforms, including possible “structural changes”.

Translated from French by DeepL/ts

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