at the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵA UK Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ 80th Anniversary Conference

Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵGA at 80: From 1946 to our Future ?

Your Royal Highness

Mr. Secretary-General,

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am honoured to join you this afternoon.

Allow me to thank the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom for convening this special commemorative gathering here in the very place where the General Assembly met for the first time, eighty years ago.

If the signing of the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Charter, less than a year earlier in San Francisco, planted the seed of modern multilateralism, that first meeting of the General Assembly was the moment it came to fruition.

80 years later, we can see the seeds that our predecessors planted blossom in the textbooks distributed by Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵICEF, in the rice delivered through emergency assistance by the World Food Programme, and in the work of the General Assembly, the most representative Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ body, now with 193 member states, giving it unique political legitimacy and moral authority.

At the same time, we shouldn¡¯t ¨C not even on anniversaries ¨C sugarcoat that the United Nations and its principles are not only under pressure but under attack, as not all of us are singing from the same songbook anymore.

So, let us use this special moment, inside this wonderful building, not ?simply to celebrate, but rather to reflect on what can be learned from that cold January day in 1946 when delegates walked the same streets of London as we did this morning, but streets that were scarred by the devastation of war, committed by my country back then, Nazi Germany

Many of the 51 founding states knew almost nothing but suffering and despair: two World Wars in a generation, 70 million dead, the horrors of the Holocaust revealed to our collective shame, Nagasaki and Hiroshima obliterated, ?over 700 million ¨C nearly a third of humanity back then ¨C still under colonial rule.

And yet, when we look at the archival photographs and footage of that first meeting of the General Assembly in January 1946, something remarkable stands out: the faces, the smiles, the unmistakable presence of hope.

Hope that, even after catastrophe, nations could break the cycle of destruction and choose cooperation over confrontation.

The resolve they demonstrated then, leaves us with no excuse today.

Yes, we meet in challenging times, but if our predecessors could emerge from devastation with the resolve to chart a better path forward, how can we credibly argue that we are incapable of doing the same?

We need to summon the same resolve found by the delegates in this Hall eighty years ago, to form a cross-regional alliance to defend our international rules-based order.

Looking at the last two weeks, this obviously sounds much easier than it is.

Yet the story of the United Nations was never one of simple victories, nor was it built for easy tasks. It was built from the beginning by, and relied on, those who were steering against unimaginably heavy headwinds.

Take a look at the archival footage again. We find within these black and white, grainy videos with crackling sound, the crystal-clear call from the then British Prime Minister Clement Attlee: ¡°we must and will succeed¡¯. In spite of those who called them na?ve, or pure idealists, we know now that they did succeed.

So, every time I hear the argument these days that it is na?ve, or it won¡¯t help to speak up when our Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Charter is being violated, I can¡¯t stop thinking about them, and about ¡°how many blows can international order endure?¡±

Can any country truly sleep in peace if we simply accept that more and more Member States, including some Permanent Members of the Security Council, violate the Charter¡¯s core principles?

When compromise shifts from mutual accommodation to the slow erosion, or the deliberate dismantling, of the very foundations of this institution, it is no longer a compromise, but compromising.

And history teaches us that when so-called realpolitik is confused with appeasement, the result can be catastrophic, as symbolized above by the ruins of London in 1945.

So as much as the world needs the United Nations, the United Nations currently needs you: to stand up for it, to defend it, and to engage with it.

We need representatives. We need governments. We need those permanent members of the Security Council who still keep both feet firmly planted in the Charter.

And we need you, the United Nations Association, civil society, the public, the true believers in multilateralism, to remind all of us in parliaments, governments, in speeches or via social media, every day that the principles of the United Nations Charter are our common life insurance.

We need you to take a stand if our heavily needed reform debates become weaponized to make the United Nations not more efficient or less bureaucratic, but threaten to uproot the second and third branches that hold up the United Nations, alongside peace and security, sustainable development, and human rights ¨C the interlinking pillars of the United Nations.

So, if in future discussions in your parliaments or on your TV screens, you might hear that fighting inequalities and climate change, defending human rights, especially women¡¯s rights, are ¡°outside the core mandate of the United Nations¡±, or? they might be dismissed as the new ¡°woke¡±, show them not only the Charter, but also the archival footage.

There is something particularly striking within it. At a time when women were largely absent from formal positions of power, alongside the first meeting of the General Assembly, we see a side event led by Eleanor Roosevelt, composed of, indeed packed with, women.

From these early days, it was crystal clear that peace and security would never be achieved if half of society were excluded.

Thanks to figures of lasting significance, such as Dr. Hansa Mehta of India, the Universal Declaration affirmed that all human beings, not just men, are born free and equal.

So let no one suggest that standing up for all of humanity is not embedded in the very DNA of this institution.

In this regard the choice made by the 193 Member States in selecting the next Secretary-General of this institution will send a powerful signal whether 80 years later this organization truly serves all of humanity ¨C half of which are women and girls.

 

Dear Excellencies,

At the beginning of 2026 we are not only standing at a crossroads, but history will show whether we find the same courage and determination as our founding fathers and our founding mothers did 80 years ago.

We will see it in the face of the next Secretary-General. We will feel it in the scale and ambition of our reforms, and we will judge it against the promises etched into our Charter.

So as we move forward, let us be decisive, let us be principled, let us be better together.

 

ends