From a letter with Lusa
This month, the Portuguese president will travel to Rome for the Arraiolos Group meeting and to New York to attend the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
According to two draft resolutions that were received by the Assembly of the Republic today, the head of state requested permission to travel to Rome from 14 to 16 September and to New York from 18 to 23 September.
Rome will host the 16th meeting of the Arraiolos Group, which annually brings together the non-executive presidents of the European Union member states. This was the initiative of Jorge Sampaio when he was President of the Republic.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa spent less than three months at United Nations headquarters when Antonio Guterres was sworn in for a second five-year term as Secretary General of the organization, which runs from early 2022 to late 2026.
On this occasion, on 18 June, the President of the Republic addressed the General Assembly in which he argued that the former Portuguese Prime Minister was “the right man at the right time” to lead the UN and praised his commitment to multilateralism. …
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa made his debut in the annual general debate between the heads of state and government of the 193 UN member states in 2016, defending that the new Secretary General should be “a collection of spirits and desires.” through Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
At this 71st session of the UN General Assembly, the President of Portugal focused on the candidacy of Antonio Guterres for the post of Secretary General of the organization, a post to which the former Portuguese Prime Minister will be elected in less than a month, taking office on 01 January 2017.
At the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly in 2017, the Portuguese state was represented by Prime Minister Antonio Costa.
In 2018 and 2019, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa once again represented Portugal in the general debates of the 73rd and 74th sessions of the UN General Assembly.
In 2020, he was prime minister again to speak at the 75th session of the UN General Assembly, which was held using video interventions due to the covid-19 pandemic.
Last year, the 16th meeting of the Arraiolos group was scheduled to take place in Lisbon from 8 to 9 October, which ultimately did not take place due to the covid-19 pandemic.
In 2003, then President of the Portuguese Republic, Jorge Sampaio, met in the village of Arraiolos in Alentejo to discuss the future of the European Union with a group of heads of state with powers similar to his own.
In 2018, when the Arraiolos group met in Riga, Latvia, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa announced that Lisbon would host the 2020 meeting, which is being organized by Portugal.
At a meeting next year in Athens, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said the Lisbon meeting “will take stock and see which group that gathers each year needs to change” and analyze whether it should “expand and connect with other realities. not even related to them. -European “.
“The world and Europe have changed so much that we must rethink the Arraiolos Group,” the president of the republic believes.
Since the meeting in Arraiolos in 2003, these informal meetings have been held annually.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who took office as President of the Republic in March 2016, attended the 12th meeting, which took place in the same year in Bulgaria, at the 13th meeting in Malta, in 2017, at the 14th meeting in Latvia and 15th meeting. in Greece.
