United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres presented the winners of the Nelson Mandela Prize and urged world leaders to renew commitments to the principles of freedom, justice and human dignity as the United Nations marks its eightieth anniversary.

Guterres said the prize winners — Brenda Reynolds, a member of Fishing Lake First Nation in Canada and a social worker, and Kennedy Odede, founder of a Kenyan organization serving residents of Kibera — “embody Nelson Mandela’s words” and the spirit of grassroots action. He quoted Mandela: “What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived, it is what difference we have made to the lives of others.”

The secretary-general framed Mandela’s life as a lesson in reconciliation and collective action rather than retribution. “Madiba's extraordinary life was a triumph of the human spirit,” Guterres said, adding that Mandela “endured the brutal weight of oppression and emerged not with a vision of vengeance and division, but of reconciliation, peace, and unity.”

Guterres described Reynolds’s work as turning “the struggle against the most hideous of crimes against children into a national force for change, supporting and developing trauma responses for survivors and families of the residential school system.” He said Odede’s organization grew from community activism in Kibera and now “reaches more than 2,400,000 people each year with essential services, everything from education to water.”

Linking the prize presentation to the broader UN anniversary, Guterres said human rights and dignity face threats from conflict, systematic inequality, exclusion, climate disasters and the rollback of freedoms. He called for a renewal of commitment to “freedom, justice, equal rights, solidarity, reconciliation, peace.”

The remarks combined celebration of the prize winners with a broader appeal to member states and civil society to sustain and deepen efforts to protect human rights and serve vulnerable populations. Guterres closed his remarks with a thank-you to the assembly.