António Guterres

António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres (born 30 April 1949 in Lisbon) is a Portuguese statesman who became the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations on 1 January 2017, succeeding Ban Ki-moon. He was reappointed by the General Assembly in June 2021 for a second five-year term ending 31 December 2026.

Before the UN's top post, Guterres served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, leading the Socialist Party, and as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. He then headed the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from June 2005 to December 2015, a decade marked by the Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi displacement crises.

As Secretary-General, Guterres has prioritized:

• Climate action, repeatedly warning of a "code red for humanity" after the IPCC's 2021 AR6 report and convening the 2019 and 2023 Climate Ambition Summits.
• UN reform, including his 2017 management, peace-and-security, and development system reforms.
• A long-term agenda set out in Our Common Agenda (2021) and the Pact for the Future adopted at the Summit of the Future in September 2024.
• Mediation efforts on Ukraine, including helping broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2022 alongside Türkiye, and on Gaza, where he invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter in December 2023 — a rarely used power to bring a threat to international peace and security to the Security Council's attention.

Guterres is a trained electrical engineer and physicist from Instituto Superior Técnico and speaks Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish. He is widely regarded as a consensus-builder, though critics argue the office has limited leverage over permanent Security Council members, particularly during the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.