UNITED NATIONS, September 22. /TASS/. The United Nations General Assembly has lost its viability while the crisis of the global governance system requires structural changes, Brazilian President Inacio Lula da Silva said.

"We lack ambition and courage. The pandemic, conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, the arms race, the climate crisis have revealed the limitations of multilateral formats," he said at the Summit of the Future at the UN headquarters.

"The General Assembly has lost its viability, <…> the Security Council’s legitimacy is weakening every time when the Council uses double standards of keeps silent in the face of atrocities," he stressed. "The Bretton Woods institutions are ignoring the priorities and needs of the developing world, countries of the global South are not duly represented, it doesn’t correspond to their demographic and economic weight."

"The sustainable development goals are the biggest diplomatic success. Now we are on out way to see them become the biggest collective failure," the Brazilian president noted, adding that "only 17% of the agenda goals will be achieved as planned" (by 2030 - TASS), if the current pace of their implementation continues.

"As the president of the Group of Twenty, Brazil will set up a global alliance for fighting famine and poverty to give an impetus to the efforts toward the resolution of all problems," Lula da Silva said. "The current levels of greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financing are not enough to ensure the planet’s security."

The Summit of the Future is running at the UN headquarters in New York on September 22 and 23 ahead of the political debate of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly. The summit’s goal is to discuss global challenges and elaborate collective solutions. However, UN Security Council members are not participating in it at the level of heads of state and government. The Summit has adopted three key documents, namely the Pact for the Future, the Global Digital Compact, and the Declaration on Future Generations.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin told the UN Summit of the Future that a number of delegations did not support the text that had been submitted with violations of the procedure. The senior Russian diplomat suggested that President of the UN General Assembly 79th session Philemon Yang postpone the voting on the document until all of its provisions were agreed. After Russia’s amendment was declined, Vershinin said that Russia was distancing itself from the consensus on the Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact. He said that this especially concerned provisions on disarmament, issues of the participation of non-governmental organizations in the activities of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky stressed that the adopted document is unbalanced, has dangerous provisions and is a blow on the world organization. According to the Russian diplomats, the United Nations has infringed upon its own principles to pander to a group of delegations, who usurped the talks from the very beginning.