Lisbon, Nov. 5, 2024 (Lusa) - Portugal's minister of state and foreign affairs, Paulo Rangel, has said that the presence in Russia for the BRICS summit of the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, "was not a happy formula."
Speaking in a joint parliamentary hearing on Monday of the committee on budget, finance and public administration and the committee on foreign affairs and Portuguese communities and European affairs, as part of the committee stage of the 2025 budget bill, Bruno Ventura of the governing Social Democratic Party (PSD) questioned the minister about Guterres's trip to Kazan, Russia, for the summit of the BRICS leading emerging economies at the end of October, when he had not attended the peace summit organised by Ukraine in Switzerland last June.
"I've been a great supporter of the secretary-general of the United Nations," responded the minister, arguing that the fact that Guterres “didn't go to the Zurich conference and then went to the BRICS meeting is something that creates problems.
"It wasn't a happy formula," he went on. "I am and will be at his side, as I have been in the past."
His comment now, the minister stressed, “is not a criticism”.
The UN secretary-general, Rangel noted, "has to maintain relations with any party, even the most problematic ones, but there are many ways of doing it and giving signals.
"You either go all out or you have to have some criteria," he emphasised.
During the same hearing, in response to Socialist Party (PS) member João Paulo Rebelo, who denounced "campaigns to discredit the United Nations and its secretary-general," Rangel said: "Do I think [Guterres] should have gone to the Zurich summit? I think he should have. I would have preferred him to have gone.
"I'm very comfortable, because I've always defended the secretary-general," he said. "That's not criticising him, it's not weakening him.
"I don't criticise the fact that he went to the BRICS," he reiterated, referring again to the Zurich summit: "It would have been good if there had also been such a gesture with Ukraine."
Guterres's trip to Kazan, during which he met with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, prompted criticism from the government in Kyiv, which then refused to allow the UN leader to visit Ukraine.
JH/ARO // ARO.
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