Khalilur Rahman took the gavel as President of the UN General Assembly’s 81st session amid what he calls a crisis of confidence in the organization he has served – in one capacity or another – for 35 years.
The top Bangladeshi diplomat and sitting foreign minister has staked his one-year presidency on a single ambition: restoring trust.
It’s a theme he returns to often, tracing it back to the optimism of the UN’s founding in 1945 and the gap between what Member States expected then and what the organization has delivered since.
As High-Level Week gets underway – the busiest week of the UN calendar, the largest gathering of world leaders in one place anywhere on the planet – Mr. Rahman sat down with UN News to discuss what a “much needed transformation” would actually look like, why he believes artificial intelligence poses a test unlike anything the UN has faced before and what lessons from his work on the Rohingya crisis he is carrying into the role.
He also addressed critics who argue the assembly is toothless compared with a gridlocked Security Council, and reflected on the moment, more than four decades after serving his own foreign minister during a previous Bangladeshi presidency of the assembly, that brought him back to lead it himself.
by UN News – ‘Violence will only defer a problem’: UN Assembly President on trust, AI and lessons from the Rohingya crisis
