Antonio Guterres
António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres (Lisbon, April 30, 1949) is a Portuguese politician, physical engineer and teacher. Since January 1, 2017, he is the Secretary General of the United Nations. He previously held the positions of Prime Minister of Portugal (1995-2002), President of the Socialist International (1999-2005) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2005-2015).
Biography
He is the son of Virgílio Dias Guterres (senior official of the Companhia de Gás e Electricidade de Lisboa) and Ilda Cândida de Oliveira.
In 1972, he married the psychiatrist Luísa Amélia Guimarães e Melo (1946-1998), with whom he had two children, Pedro Guimarães and Melo Guterres (1977) and Mariana Guimarães and Melo de Oliveira Guterres. His wife died of complications from a liver transplant performed in London at the Royal Free Hospital. In 2001 he married his second wife, Catarina Marqués de Almeida Vaz Pinto (1960), former Portuguese Secretary of State for Culture and more recently Secretary of Culture of the Lisbon City Council.
Guterres is a practicing Catholic. During his college years, he co-founded Grupo de Luz, a think-tank for young Catholics, where he met Vítor Melíci, a Franciscan priest and church administrator who remains a close friend and confidant of his.
He studied at the prestigious Liceo de Camões (now Camões High School) where he graduated in 1965, winning the Prémio Nacional dos Liceus as the best student in the country. He studied Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa. He graduated in 1971 and began an academic career as an assistant professor of Teaching Systems Theory and Telecommunications Signals, before leaving academia to pursue a political career.
Activist of the Juventud Universitária Católica, he participated in numerous actions, including those to support the victims of the 1967 floods. the priest Vítor Melícias.
He joined the Socialist Party of Portugal in 1974, the same year the Carnation Revolution brought democracy to the country.
In 1992 he was elected president of the Socialist Party and leader of the opposition to the government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva. He was also appointed vice president of the Socialist International in September of that same year. From 1999 to 2005 he was president of this organization.
After the victory of the Socialist Party in the 1995 elections, Guterres was invited to form a government. He was re-elected in 1999 and, from January to July 2000, he held the presidency of the European Council. At the end of 2001, after the disastrous result of the Socialist Party in the local elections, Guterres resigned and ended his government. The 2002 elections were won by José Manuel Durão Barroso's Social Democratic Party.
On May 2, 1998, he attended the summit in Brussels that brought together the main leaders of the European Union (EU), in which the definitive list of the eleven countries that would make up the vanguard group of the newly created single European currency (the euro), among which was Portugal.
That same year, 1998, his government called two referendums, the first of which took place in June and called for a vote on a possible extension of the decriminalization of the practice of abortion, with the result of the victory of the « No". The second referendum took place in November and questioned the so-called Law of the Regions, which sought to create a new territorial organization through the institution of eight administrative regions, but the result was a failure of his Government's proposal.
António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres was appointed high commissioner of the United Nations for Refugees (UNHCR) on June 15, 2005, a position in which he served until December 15, 2015, leading the organization for some of the worst refugee crises in history, including Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
In October 2016, he was elected Secretary General of the UN for a period of 5 years (2017-2021), succeeding Ban Ki-moon, on the proposal of the Security Council ratified by the General Assembly on 13 October. October 2016. In December he announced that, as he had promised in his candidacy, his closest team would be made up of three women respecting gender parity: the Nigerian Amina Mohammed, Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations; the Brazilian Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, his chief of staff, and the Korean Kyung-wha Kang, appointed special adviser for political affairs and respecting geographic diversity.
Since January 1, 2017, he has been the Secretary-General of the United Nations. On June 18, 2021, he was re-elected for a second 5-year term, which officially began on January 1, 2022.
Personal life
Guterres is a practicing Catholic. In addition to his native Portuguese, Guterres speaks French, English and Spanish.
Other activities
- Caixa Geral de Depósitos, member of the Board of Directors (2003-2005)
- Champalimaud Foundation, member of the Vision Award Jury
- Club de Madrid, member (since 2002)
- European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), member
- European Regional Innovation Awards, President of the Jury (2004)
- Friends of Europe. Member of the Board of Directors
- Friends of Europe, member of the Board of Directors
- Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, non-executive member of the Board of Directors (2013-2018)
- Member of the Council of State of Portugal, appointed by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (2015, resigned after his appointment as 9th UN Secretary General)
Awards and decorations
- 2002: Military Order of Christ in 2002.
- 2005: Personality of the Year by the Association of Foreign Press in Portugal (AIEP).
- 2007: Freedom Award.
- 2009: Calouste Gulbenkian International Prize (shared with the Middle East Peace Research Institute).
- 2009: Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world in 2009 [62].
- 2015: Averell Harriman W Democracy Award.
- 2015: The German National Sustainability Award.
- 2019: Carlomagno Award.