Mr Boutros-Ghali, from Egypt, served as UN chief for only one term but was the first African to head the world body.
He was also one of the most controversial figures in UN history.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali came from a wealthy Coptic family.
His grandfather was Egypt's prime minister until his assassination in 1910.
Before joining the United Nations, Mr Boutros-Ghali worked in the administrations of Egyptian presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.
He stepped into the UN post in 1992 at a time of dramatic world change.
There was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a single-superpower era dominated by the United States.
Venezuela's ambassador to the United Nations, Rafael Dario, announced his death.
"Dear colleagues, we have been informed that Secretary-General Boutrous Boutros-Ghali has passed away. We want to ask to the members of the Security Council to keep a minute of silence in his memory."
His successor, Ban Ki Moon, has paid tribute to him.
"The late secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a respected statesman in the service of his country Egypt. He was a well-known scholar of international law and brought formidable experience and intellectual power to the task of piloting the United Nations through one of the most tumultuous and challenging periods in its history and guiding the organisation of the Francophonie in subsequent years. As the secretary-general, he presided over a dramatic rise in UN peacekeeping. He also presided over a time when the world increasingly turned to the United Nations for solutions to its problems in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War."
Mr Ban says Mr Boutros-Ghali helped shape the United Nations' response to new challenges.
"In particular, through his landmark report 'An Agenda for Peace' and the subsequent agendas for development and democratisation. He showed courage in posing difficult questions to the member states and rightly insisted on the independence of his office and of the Secretariat as a whole. His commitment to the United Nations -- its mission and its staff -- was unmistakable, and the mark he has left on the organisation is indelible."
But the former secretary-general was not without his critics.
He associated himself with the famine in Somalia and organised the first massive UN relief operation in the Horn of Africa nation.
But success eluded him there and elsewhere as the UN struggled in an increasingly disorderly post-communist world.
He was criticised for the world body's failure to act during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Mr Boutros-Ghali was also denounced for not pushing hard enough for UN intervention to end Angola's civil war, one of the longest-running conflicts in the world at the time.
But in Mozambique, he played a role in bringing about a peace process that led to peaceful elections in 1994.
However, they only went ahead after rebel leader Afonso Dhlakama was paid $20 million not to boycott them.
Speaking in 1993, Mr Boutros-Ghali called on the rebel group RENAMO and the ruling party FRELIMO to end what, at that stage, was a 16-year conflict.
"If we are not successful, very often this is due that the two parties have not the political will to solve the problem. And the new danger now is that, if there is no political will to solve the problem among the protagonists of the dispute, the United Nations will just withdraw."
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