The 77th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations Organization on October 24, 1945 is a more than adequate time to take a look at the role and functions of the position of Secretary General of the United Nations, probably the most difficult or most impossible job in the world. world. The chronicles tell that it was described in this way by the one who was its first general secretary, Trygve Lie, when in 1953 he handed over to his successor, Dag Hammarskjöld.
Since then, the general secretaries of this international organization have succeeded each other, nine counting its current head, the Portuguese António Guterres. Until now, there has been no woman, although when Guterres was elected there were several candidates who applied for such a coveted and complex position. On that occasion, moreover, a new, more transparent, open and inclusive selection and appointment procedure was tested for the first time, with a process for requesting candidacies from the Member States, the publicity of the names of the candidates and hearings, dialogues or meetings with all of them in order for them to present their vision and their proposals for the position.
professional profiles
The elected person is required to embody the highest degree of efficiency, competence and integrity and demonstrate a strong commitment to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. The revamped selection procedure provides, more specifically, that States are asked to submit nominations with proven leadership and management skills, extensive experience in international relations, and strong multilingual, diplomatic and communication skills, thus describing some of the the inherent characteristics of this position.
Both the candidates in the 2016 selection process, as well as the previous general secretaries, have been characterized by having fairly similar professional profiles such as experienced diplomats, senior officials of the United Nations itself or other international organizations, or state political leaders with government experience. .
António Guterres also met this biographical profile when he was appointed in 2016 for a mandate that began on January 1, 2017, competing with twelve other candidates. Indeed, a deputy in the Portuguese Parliament for the Socialist Party for many years, Guterres was Prime Minister of Portugal between 1995 and 2002, and was also appointed President of the Socialist International from 1995 to 2005. Completing this high-level political profile, since 2005 until 2015 he served as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
A conditioned police selection
As established by the Charter of the United Nations, the secretary general of the organization is elected by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. The 193 member states of the organization participate in the General Assembly and each one has one vote and the election is usually by acclamation. In this sense, the determining body is the Security Council, made up of 15 member states and where the role of the five permanent members (United States, Russia, China, Great Britain and France) who have the ability to veto the proposal is decisive. .
The selection is, therefore, politically conditioned, but not in the sense of the ideology or political family to which the candidate may belong, but in the sense that they are the Member States of the Council of Security, in particular the permanent members, those who end up deciding and recommending a candidacy to the General Assembly.
Hence also, on the one hand, that, beyond the individual aspirations of a candidate, it is the Member States that formulate the proposals for candidacies; and, on the other hand, that it has been tacitly agreed that in no case can the person holding the general secretariat be a national of a permanent member state of the Security Council.
The rules do not write about the choice
In addition to this tacit pact not to elect any national of permanent member states of the Security Council, it is also a tradition that the duration of the mandate is five years with the possibility of opting for a renewal for another five years. This has been the general practice, except in the case of Boutros-Ghali, who was vetoed by the United States when running for a second term in 1996.
This designation for a second five-year term is so common that António Guterres found no competition when he ran for a second term, which began on January 1, 2022 and will end on December 31, 2026, without the burden of having to seek re-election.
Another unwritten rule is the criterion of geographical distribution among the five main groups of the United Nations (African States; Latin American and Caribbean States; Asian and Pacific States; Western European and other States; and States of Eastern Europe).
Thus, after a Norwegian (Trygve Lie) and a Swede (Dag Hammarskjöld), a Burmese (U Thant), an Austrian (Kurt Waldheim), a Peruvian (Javier Pérez de Cuéllar), an Egyptian (Boutros Boutros-Ghali), a Ghanaian (Kofi Annan), a Korean (Ban Ki-moon) and, finally, with António Guterres, another Western European.
In reality, following this criterion of geographical distribution, in the 2016 election the position should have gone to a candidate from the Eastern European States, but the political agreement ultimately favored Guterres.
UN Secretary General António Guterres addresses the United Nations General Assembly at its 77th session (New York, September 20, 2022). /
no functions
The Charter of the United Nations establishes that the Secretary-General “is the highest administrative official of the organization” and is in charge of all the personnel and all the administrative and bureaucratic fabric necessary to support the United Nations organs that are , normally, of intergovernmental composition.
In addition to his administrative and support functions, there are also responsibilities of a more political-diplomatic nature that allow him to interact both with the main organs of the United Nations and with the Member States, with discreet diplomacy and a great deal of political skill. All this gives it an important international projection and a high degree of leadership and moral authority.
This projection and this leadership obviously depend, on the one hand, on the capacities of the head of the body and, certainly, there have been more active and visionary general secretaries than others. On the other hand, they fundamentally depend on the international context in which their mandate is carried out, that is, whether it finds itself in a favorable international situation and whether the member states are minimally receptive to their proposals. A context that allows the message and vision of the Secretary General to be mobilizing and ends up spreading and capillarizing in international society in political and operational terms.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and António Guterres in Moscow on April 26, 2022. /
An agenda of challenges
In this regard, and on the occasion of the organization’s 75th anniversary, the General Assembly adopted a Declaration in 2020 in which, among other aspects, twelve spheres of action were defined that could only be addressed through a revitalized multilateralism. As a follow-up to this Declaration, in September 2021 Secretary General Guterres presented his recommendations to advance this agenda. The report, entitled Our Common Agenda, is highly suggestive and proactive and can be a real catalyst and constitute a step forward towards a more effective multilateral system that better addresses current and future challenges.
However, the current international context, with the war in Ukraine and its multiple consequences, makes this necessary path forward perhaps impossible or, at least, very difficult. As impossible or difficult as it turns out to be the work of the person who embodies the Secretary General of the United Nations. Despite all this, when he renewed for his second term, Guterres promised to work to “inspire hope that we can change things, that the impossible can be possible.”
This article has been published in ‘The conversation‘.
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