As desperate Afghans were trying to escape the Taliban and board planes, during chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for international unity on Afghanistan, in a briefing to an emergency session of the Security Council. Mr. Guterres appealed for the Council to stand as one, and ensure that human rights are upheld, humanitarian aid continues, and that the country does not again become a platform for terrorism.

UN Secretary-General called on Taliban militants to “immediately halt” their offensive against Government forces and return to the negotiating table in good faith, “in the interest of Afghanistan, and its people.” He told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York that humanitarian needs were “growing by the hour” and the country largely spinning out of control.

The COVID pandemic has taken four million lives, devastated the global economy, pushed a further 124 million people into extreme poverty and continues to inflict profound suffering – dramatically impacting progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN chief said. “Nearly one person in three around the world could not access adequate food in 2020 – an increase of nearly 320 million people in one year”, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Opening of the Ministerial Segment of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).

“Gender equality is essentially about power, and power in a world that is still largely male dominated, with a culture that is still largely patriarchal”, Secretary-General António Guterres said at the Generation Equality Forum, launching a “five-year action journey”, based on the UN Global Acceleration Plan for Gender Equality. Noting that “power is very rarely given. You have to take it”, he stressed as one of his five priorities, the importance of parity to redistribute power and create the necessary conditions for true equality.  

The European Union (EU) must use its leverage to ensure people everywhere have access to COVID-19 vaccines, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. In a wide-ranging multilingual speech to the European Parliament in Brussels, the UN chief underscored the need to ramp up vaccinations globally. “The pandemic is causing more deaths today than a year ago.  And vaccines are our only way out of this crisis. They must be considered as a global public good, available and affordable to all,” he said.