United Nations Secretariat

Yo creo que sí", a la pregunta de si no hay segunda sin tercera.

Bachelet, de setenta y cinco años, retiró hace poco su nombre de la lista de aspirantes a la Secretaría General de las Naciones Unidas.

Y aquí termina Y esto no es todo, donde siempre habrá más.

En la producción estuvo Willy Rodríguez.

We're all guilty, though, of it.

If we are rotten where standards are concerned as a global community, at least the UN Secretariat, which is a principal organ of the UN, should try and maintain a higher standard.

Has the rot been in place since then? I think it's more recent than that.

When I was in the UN, it would be inconceivable that the UN would allow Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the then president of Sudan, indicted by the ICC, to come and address it.

Speaker, let us look at the present management of the United Nations.

Russia had been demanding a troika to supplant the United Nations Secretariat after the death of Hammarskjold.

The failure of Russia to secure this troika was hailed as a great victory for the West.

But was it? U Thant of Burma, a self-styled Marxist, was chosen and he agreed to invite a limited number of United Nations undersecretaries to act as my principal advisors on important questions.

The Secretary General has done a lot of tinkering, let me say, with the support of certain member states on financial rules and regulations, and we've averted the worse.

They will inherit a UN secretariat that is dedicated, that is ready to continue full steam ahead and is determined.

Determined is a critical word because it's in that first sentence in the charter and we continue to be determined to build a better world.

My toughest briefing is I think when I speak about the cruelty imposed on the most vulnerable.

And the Security Council is an extremely important forum to bring adversarial powers together.

The question that comes from that, John, is does that trickle down? Do we therefore need all these various humanitarian agencies, all these Byzantine committees that sit inside the UN Secretariat, this sprawling bureaucracy? And the UN has made some effort to address that.

Guterres has his own UN80 reform scheme.

But again, you know, we're seeing a lot of waste, and I think that's why Guterres said earlier this year that the UN was facing imminent financial collapse.

Sure.

So the United Nations Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs is a office or undersecretary level position inside the UN Secretariat.

And they're essentially supposed to be a coordinating body.

They have some money themselves that they distribute to other parts of the UN system or other international NGOs to implement.

During the Cold War, diplomats from the communist bloc literally wouldn't talk to their counterparts from Western countries unless they absolutely had to.

Now there was this new spirit of communication, there was a new spirit of cooperation, and you had ambassadors working with the UN Secretariat to develop new ideas that were passed through the General Assembly about how to develop new arms of the UN, like the Peace Building Commission, which was approved in 2005.

As globalization accelerated in the new millennium, the United Nations faced new economic, environmental and political challenges.

Looking back at the 2000s, which debates or decisions do you think most shaped the General Assembly's role?

And also if the organization's leadership is sort of willing to stick its neck out and sort of say, look, we can offer things that others cannot offer.

And on the peace operations, for at least a decade, probably now longer, the UN Secretariat has noted that it's often having to deploy operations where there's no peace to keep, maybe not even a credible political track, that it has to deal with all sorts of different armed groups that are maybe outside of process, that it has to struggle against.

But the reality at the moment is that wars, if they end, for now are unlikely to end with big I mean, we've talked about this a great deal on the show before, then they will more likely end in ceasefires, ceasefires that look very shaky, warring parties with always sort of one eye on when they have an opportune moment to go back to war every step forward.

is going to require pretty much the same amount of political capital from states involved, the same amount of pressure on the parties and often their foreign backers, as was needed to get them to a ceasefire.