António Guterres

António Guterres issued fresh alarm on 24 July 2026 over resumed Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, speaking alongside UN Yemen envoy Hans Grundberg the same day. It came as his office also weighed in on a separate maritime crisis, the roughly 6,000 seafarers stranded in the Strait of Hormuz that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk had flagged that same day.

Qatar had earlier addressed one of its two dated compensation letters against Iran to Guterres on 21 July, alongside the ambassador of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who holds the July Security Council presidency. Guterres, a Portuguese diplomat and former Prime Minister of Portugal, is serving his second term as UN Secretary-General, running to the end of 2026. He was previously UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 2005 to 2015.

His office is where formal grievances from the Iran war are lodged for the record, whether or not the Security Council acts on them, and where UN alarm over the widening Red Sea and Hormuz shipping crisis is now being voiced in parallel by his own Yemen envoy. Qatar's letter cites Resolution 2817 and reserves its Article 51 right of self-defence, keeping a dated, written claim on file that any Council member can later invoke.