Statement by Mr Oļegs Iļģis, DPR of Latvia to the United Nations at the informal meeting of the General Assembly on the UN80 Initiative
New York, 29 June 2026
Thank you, Madam President. Distinguished briefers, distinguished colleagues,
We align with the EU statement and would like to add a few brief remarks in our national capacity.
Allow me to begin by confirming the full support of Latvia to the on-going UN80 reform process. We strongly believe in this singular opportunity to meaningfully strengthen the organisation, making it more agile and more resilient. The UN must be fit for purpose in the face of both long-standing, as well as new and emerging issues.
We have already seen important savings and optimization across the organization, as well as important progress on mandates. Successful steps in the reform process breed enthusiasm for more advances and these in turn generate even more success in reforming the organization.
The unified services roadmap is a prime example of seemingly simple, yet crucial reforms that promise direct and valuable impact on our operations. Bringing together the various operational efforts of the UN system under a single common architecture creates complementarity, predictability, efficiency and most importantly, accountability and transparency. We welcome the considerable progress achieved so far, through the Global Shared Services and Common Back Offices initiatives, among others, and we look forward to receiving the full Unified Services Roadmap.
Environmental challenges, such as the triple planetary crisis, demand a coordinated and coherent approach. We welcome the on-going efforts under this reform package to coordinate our work on the environment and streamline our efforts at a system-wide level in order to deliver the necessary impact.
Other efforts that we have discussed previously, such as expertise on demand, the reconfiguration of UN Country Teams and establishing joint knowledge hubs, are equally important examples of streamlining and system-wide coherence, not just for the sake of organizational aesthetics, but in order to deliver more for the most vulnerable on the ground around the globe.
We look forward to more information on both of these reform packages, as well as others and on the overall process as we come closer to the next GA session. We need to take advantage of the current momentum and deliver worthwhile, impactful reforms as soon as possible, but we must also ensure that the work on the ground and the important mandates governing our efforts do not suffer in the process. As clichéd as it sounds, we must in fact avoid reform just for the reform’s sake and do more with less.
Finally, let me once more thank the Secretariat for their continued efforts and encourage all states to engage constructively and actively in the UN80 process across the three workstreams, in order to deliver a UN that can continue to address the pressing challenges of today and tomorrow.
Thank you!