October 5, 2016 | No Comments
António Guterres, a Socialist former prime minister of Portugal, is the unanimous choice of the 15-member United Nations Security Council to become the next leader of the organization, the ambassadors announced on Wednesday.
Guterres will replace Ban ki-Moon as a secretary-general in January. He’s a U.N. insider, who until last December had led the U.N. refugee agency.
The 15 ambassadors of the U.N. security council appeared in the lobby of United Nations headquarters in New York to make the announcement.
With the support of all of the members of the U.N. security council, the decision is all but sealed, and will be confirmed in a formal vote on Thursday 10:00am New York time.
After a long campaign involving 13 candidates, Guterres, who from the start led the race, held off a late challenge from European Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva.
In choosing Guterres, the U.N. has set aside an informal tradition of rotating the presidency by region. Had the tradition been observed, this term would have been for a candidate from Eastern Europe, which is the only region that has never held the top U.S. position.
The security council also ignored the pressure to select a woman to hold the top post.
Many observers were skeptical that he could ever pick up the support of the Russians, who had always voiced their desire for an Eastern European to get their chance at the top spot. The United States was initially thought to support Argentine Foreign Minister Susanna Malcorra, but U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power had said from the beginning that they wanted someone who could deftly take the helm.
“We’re looking for somebody with great leadership skills, great management skills, someone who has a commitment to fairness and accountability and who stays true to the founding principles of the United Nations,” Power said in July.
Along with Russia and the United States, France, the United Kingdom and China all could have used a veto to nix any candidate. France was widely believed to be the 67-year-old’s biggest backer.
Guterres’ experience running a massive UN institution was seen as a strength in this selection process, and he was viewed as one of the few candidates who would please the institution’s employee. That said, during his time at the U.N. refugee agency, known as the UNHCR, he faced some criticism for not doing enough to aid the tide of refugees flowing to Europe. Reuters reported last year that an internal audit had dinged the agency for not doing enough to help convince governments to take refugees and integrate them into their countries. The audit said, the agency fixated too much “around an emergency response model.”
Guterres has been strident in calling for Western countries to do more to protect and welcome refugees. After U.N. agencies failed to meet their funding goals that would help with basic needs for those who are displaced in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, he said: “The global humanitarian community is not broken – as a whole they are more effective than ever before. But we are financially broke.”
This selection process has also been characterized by an increased desire for more transparency. For the first time, candidates were questioned by the U.N. General Assembly participated in televised debates and submitted voluminous vision statements. Still, the security council returned to secrecy to make this decision, which is how it had been done in the past.