The President of the Republic will speak today at the 78th session of the UN General Assembly, a day before he takes part in the open Security Council, where he will speak exclusively about the war in Ukraine. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s busy schedule will prompt the head of state to pave the way for Portugal to rejoin that United Nations body as a non-permanent member.
This is the fifth time that Marcelo has spoken at the UN Assembly, at the headquarters of this international body, in New York (USA), now under the theme ‘Rebuilding trust and rekindling global solidarity: accelerating action on the 2030 Agenda and its development’. Goals Sustainable towards peace, prosperity, progress and sustainability for all people.” The first intervention of this session will be made by the President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, preceding the speech of his North American counterpart, Joe Biden, representing the host country of the meeting.
Marcelo will speak in eighth place and despite the various objectives that led him to speak in this plenary session, including the meeting he had last night with the UN Secretary General António Guterres and the meeting with the advisors of the Portuguese diaspora, The attention of the Portuguese President is focused on tomorrow’s intervention in the open Security Council of the United Nations. Speeches from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the leader of Russian diplomacy Serguei Lavrov are planned for this meeting.
Before this panel, Marcelo said last Sunday that he hoped Ukraine would have a “inevitable subject”after also recalling that the presence at the UN was one of the issues discussed between the Portuguese president and his Ukrainian counterpart when the head of state visited Kiev in August.
Now in New York, both the President of the Republic and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, João Gomes Cravinho, who is part of Marcelo’s entourage, will hold several bilateral meetings to discuss, in addition to an agenda with different objectives, Portugal’s new candidacy for a place of non-permanent member in the UN Security Council in 2027 and 2028. This United Nations body, which has five permanent members (US, China, Great Britain, France and Russia) and ten non-permanent members, included all the Portuguese participation in the biennia 1979-1980, 1997-1998 and 2011-2012.
Also yesterday, at the Summit on the Sustainable Development Goals, at the United Nations Headquarters, the President of the Republic argued during a three-minute speech that more financing is needed to achieve the goals related to the theme of this year’s UN Assembly. “We support holding a successful global social summit in Portugal with visible results”said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, recalling Portugal’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, to increase the use of renewable energy sources to 60% by 2030 and to 80% of electricity generated by renewable energy sources by 2026. “It is our duty to fulfill the promise of the 2030 Agenda, in the name of humanity and the planet”, he concluded. With Portuguese
Source: DN
