Antonio Guterres: The UN chief who infuriated Israel

Israel's demand received significant backing from prominent US politicians, with Republican Senator Ted Cruz telling Fox News, "Of course, (Guterres) should resign."

The dispute between Israel and the UN, which the Israelis have long accused of being anti-Israeli, escalated even further with the Jewish state threatening to withhold visas for UN officials, which would make international relief efforts to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Gaza even more difficult to achieve.

However, its threat has seemed to be talk as Martin Griffiths, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, tweeted Monday that he was in Israel — less than a week after Israel's UN ambassador said it had "refused" to grant Griffiths a visa.

On Monday, Israel's ambassador in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, said, "We haven't said categorically that we're not giving visas. We understand their need to be there."

Despite coming under intense pressure to tone down his criticism of Israel's military response to the Hamas attack, Guterres remained undeterred, posting on the social media platform X — formerly known as Twitter — shortly after Israel launched its ground operations into Gaza, that "the protection of civilians is paramount. The Laws of War establish clear rules to protect human life and respect humanitarian concerns. Those laws cannot be contorted for the sake of expedience."

Given Guterres's previous role as the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, it is only to be expected that the 74-year-old former Portuguese premier should feel compelled to speak his mind on what he regards as the long-standing injustices relating to the Palestinian people.

A politician with a conscience

One of the defining characteristics of his decades-long career in mainstream politics has, after all, been his unwavering commitment to the promotion of human dignity for all.

From working as a volunteer in the poor neighbourhoods of Lisbon where he was born, to representing his constituency in the Portuguese parliament before ultimately becoming Portugal's Prime Minister in 1995, Guterres has made his name as a politician whose primary goals are to ease suffering, protect the vulnerable and ensure human rights for all. 

Guterres was born in Lisbon in 1949 and graduated from the Instituto Superior Técnico with a degree in engineering. He is fluent in Portuguese, English, French and Spanish, and married to Catarina de Almeida Vaz Pinto, Lisbon's deputy mayor for culture. He has two children, a stepson and three grandchildren.

A prominent figure in European socialist circles, Guterres has previously described himself as a proud multilateralist, while stressing that international cooperation on major global issues cannot always be taken for granted. "We must prove its value by addressing the real problems people face," he once remarked.

For many years, Guterres was active in the Socialist International, a worldwide organisation of social democratic political parties. He was the group's vice-president from 1992 to 1999, co-chairing the African Committee and the Development Committee.

During his career in Portuguese politics, one of Guterres's more significant achievements was the role he played as a member of the team that negotiated the country's 1986 entrance into the European Union.

UN career

After leaving office as prime minister in 2002, Guterres served as UN High Commissioner for Refugees from June 2005 to December 2015. During that time, he had to deal with the humanitarian fall-out from conflicts, including the wars in Syria, and Iraq, as well as the crises in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Yemen.

His term in office witnessed a huge rise in UNHCR's activities across the globe,  as the number of people displaced by conflict and persecution rose from 38 million in 2005 to over 60 million in 2015.

It was during his 11-year term as head of the UNHCR that Guterres acquired a reputation as an effective leader, especially when it came to his efforts to help defuse Europe's migrant crisis caused by the Syrian civil war.  

Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the UN Foundation— an NGO started by Ted Turner to support UN causes, recalls that Guterres was always willing to highlight the plight of the refugees, and was not afraid to call out "governments around the world to address this issue both in these places where migration starts and in the places where migrants and refugees end up."

It was this willingness to take on difficult issues that ultimately led to his appointment as the UN's ninth Secretary-General in 2017, becoming the first national leader to take the role of the world's top diplomat.

The surprising ease of Guterres's selection, which received broad support from the UN's 193 member states, came at a time when the Security Council was bitterly divided over finding a solution to the humanitarian crisis caused by the Syrian conflict.

Read more: Why establishing 'safe zones' in Gaza is highly unlikely

After Guterres won the council's unanimous backing in a straw poll, Samantha Powers, the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, commented, "I think every day we go into the Security Council, we aspire for the kind of unity that we saw today, and on a crisis with carnage as horrific as that in Syria, the urgency of achieving that unity is no secret to anyone. And it's not something we've achieved up to this point."

Until the eruption of the Gaza crisis, Guterres's leadership of the UN  — he was re-elected to serve a second term in 2021 — was mainly defined by the high-profile stance he has adopted on tackling climate change, urging major world powers, such as the US and China, to overcome tensions and work together to help achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.  

His efforts to combat climate change have often resulted in him publicly calling out governments and companies for what he has referred to as "adding fuel to the flames".

Guterres has taken a controversial stance on a number of other global issues.

Soon after his appointment in 2017, he wrote a letter to the Security Council drawing attention to human rights abuses by the Myanmar army, although some critics at the time accused him of not going far enough, arguing that his avoidance of confrontation with other world powers had come at the expense of human rights.

He came under fire, for example, for not being more forthright in holding China to account for its mistreatment of the country's minority Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang province.

More recently, he has been very active in the Ukraine conflict after Russian forces invaded the country in February 2022. Guterres has made repeated calls for peace and met separately with the countries' leaders.

While most of his attention has been focused on humanitarian issues, such as guaranteeing aid deliveries, creating evacuation corridors, and resuming global grain shipments from Ukraine, he has also launched a fact-finding mission to investigate the killing of prisoners in the Donetsk region.

In addition, Guterres has also recognised the need for the UN and its 40,000  staff to be more innovative and effective and has set in motion wide-ranging reforms to use new technology. He is also working to make the organisation more equal, including through gender parity and improved geographical representation.

But it is in his role as the world's leading diplomat that Guterres is likely to continue dominating the headlines, fulfilling one of the key functions of the secretary-general which, according to Article 99 of the UN Charter, is to "bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security."

In this context Guterres may well be tempted to follow in the footsteps of one of his more illustrious predecessors, Kofi Annan, who famously remarked during a dangerous escalation in tensions between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999, that "no government has the right to hide behind national sovereignty in order to violate human rights." 

Guterres may well feel that the same approach needs to be taken towards the Gaza conflict if he is to succeed with his fundamental goal of saving the lives of innocent civilians.