Antonio Guterres
Antonio Guterres governed Portugal for seven years, decriminalised drug possession, and resigned rather than preside over a defeat. He was an engineer by training and a Catholic socialist by conviction, which in Portuguese politics of the 1970s made him unusual on both counts, and he led the Socialist Party to a narrow win in 1995 after a decade of centre-right government. His first term is remembered as a confident one: Portugal qualified for the single currency, the Expo of 1998 rebuilt a derelict stretch of the Lisbon waterfront, and the country's last colonial obligation was discharged when East Timor, annexed by Indonesia in 1975 after the Portuguese withdrawal, voted for independence in a referendum Lisbon had pressed for and the United Nations ran. The measure the world knows him for came in 2001. Portugal had one of the worst heroin problems in Europe. An estimated one per cent of the population was using it, and HIV rates among injectors were the highest in the European Union. The government accepted a commission's recommendation to stop treating possession of any drug as a criminal offence. Supply remained a crime; possession became an administrative matter handled by panels of doctors and social workers, with the money that had gone on prosecution redirected to treatment. and the prison population all fell over the following decade, and the policy has been examined by every government that has since considered the same question. He resigned in 2001 after heavy local election losses, saying he would not let the country fall into a political swamp. He was United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for the following decade and Secretary-General of the United Nations from 2017.
- Lived: 1949 CE – ?
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
