“Lithuania strongly supports the vision and priorities for your activities that aim at strengthening the United Nations. Lithuania is determined to support your initiatives for conflict prevention and resolution, the UN management reform, the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, etc.,” said Lithuania’s Foreign Minister.
Lithuania’s Foreign Minister and the UN Secretary-General also discussed changes in Europe’s and global security environment, laying particular emphasis on threats to international law and to a rules-based international order posed by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. According to Linkevičius, only a strong UN will be able to respond to complex challenges that plague today’s world. Lithuania’s Foreign Minister also emphasized that we could not allow the opinion that multilateral policy had lost its meaning in today’s world to prevail, because only effective multilateralism provided a stable foundation for a world based on international law and rules.
The meeting also discussed the Middle East peace process.
This is the first meeting of Linkevičius with the UN Secretary-General Guterres, who took office on 1 January 2017. Guterres, who succeeds Ban Ki-moon, was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002. Prior to his appointment as the UN Secretary-General, Guterres served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from 2005 to 2015. According to Guterres, the UN has been dominated by responding to conflict. He makes case for new efforts to prevent war, build and sustain peace, ranging from prevention, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping to peacebuilding, as well as sustainable development. According to Gutteres, special attention needs to be paid to protecting human rights.
