The Secretary-General of the United Nations is the head of the Secretariat, one of the principal organs of the United Nations. The Secretary-General acts as the de facto spokesperson and leader of the United Nations.

The current Secretary-General is Ban Ki-moon of South Korea. He became Secretary-General on 1 January 2007, and his first term will expire on 31 December 2011.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Role

Dag Hammarskjöld was an unusually active UN Secretary-General from 1953 to his death in 1961. Hammarskjöld acted as a mediator during the Suez Crisis and the 1960 capture of a US reconnaissance plane by the USSR. He also established the first UN peacekeeping force.

The Secretary-General was envisioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a "world moderator," but the office was defined in the UN Charter as the organization's "chief administrative officer" (Article 97). Nevertheless, this more restricted description has not prevented the office holders from speaking out and playing important roles on global issues, to various degrees.

The official residence of the Secretary-General is a four-story townhouse in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The townhouse was built for Anne Morgan in 1921, and donated to the United Nations in 1972.

Term and selection

Secretaries-General serve for renewable five-year terms; most have served two terms. The Charter provides for the Secretary-General to be appointed by the General Assembly upon the nomination of the Security Council. Therefore, the selection is subject to the veto of any of the five permanent members of the Security Council.

The Charter's minimal language has since been supplemented by other procedural rules and accepted practices. In practice, the Secretary-General cannot be a national of any of the permanent members of the Security Council. An accepted practice of regional rotation has also been adopted in the selection of successive candidates. This has strangely, though, resulted in no North American holder of the office. The ability of candidates to converse in both English and French is also considered an unofficial qualification for the office.

Most Secretaries-General are compromise-candidates from middle powers and with little prior fame. High-profile candidates are often touted for the job, but are almost always rejected as unpalatable to some. For instance, figures like Charles de Gaulle, Dwight Eisenhower and Anthony Eden were considered for the first Secretary-General position, but were rejected in favour of the uncontroversial Norwegian Trygve Lie. Due to international politics and mechanicisms of political compromise, there are many similarities between the process and ideals for selecting the Secretary-General and those of selecting leading figures in other international organizations, including the election of Popes in the Roman Catholic Church. Only one Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, has died in office.

In the early 1960s, Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev led an effort to abolish the Secretary-General position. The numerical superiority of the Western powers combined with the one state, one vote system meant that the Secretary-General would come from one of them, and would typically be sympathetic towards the West. Khrushchev advanced a proposal to replace the Secretary-General with a three-person leading council (a "troika"): one member from the West, one from the Communist states, and one from the Non-Aligned powers. This idea failed because the neutral powers failed to back the Soviet proposal.

Secretaries-General

Note: Alger Hiss was Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, held in April to June 1945.

#	Secretary-General	Dates in office	Country of origin	Remarks	Ref.
	Gladwyn Jebb	24 October 1945 – 1 February 1946	United Kingdom (Europe)	Served as acting Secretary-General until Lie's election
1	Trygve Lie	1 February 1946 – 10 November 1952	Norway (Europe)	Resigned	[1]
2	Dag Hammarskjöld	10 April 1953 – 18 September 1961	Sweden (Europe)	Died in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia)	[2]
3	U Thant (Burmese: ဦးသန္‌့)	30 November 1961 – 31 December 1971	Burma (Asia)	Retired after second term for personal reasons	[3]
4	Kurt Waldheim	1 January 1972 – 31 December 1981	Austria (Europe)	China vetoed his third term	[4]
5	Javier Pérez de Cuéllar	1 January 1982 – 31 December 1991	Peru (South America)	Refused a third term	[5]
6	Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Arabic: بطرس بطرس غالي)	1 January 1992 – 31 December 1996	Egypt (Africa)	The United States vetoed his second term	[6]
7	Kofi Annan	1 January 1997 – 31 December 2006	Ghana (Africa)	Retired	[7]
8	Ban Ki-moon (Korean: 반기문;潘基文)	1 January 2007–	South Korea (Asia)	Incumbent	[8]

2006 selection

When the race to succeed Kofi Annan began in 2006, it was widely expected the successful candidate would be Asian, since a number of Security Council members (including China, which has a veto) indicated they would only support an Asian candidate.^[9]

Noting that all Secretaries-General to date have been men, Equality Now launched a campaign for the election of a female Secretary-General, and identified a ‘sampling’ of 18 qualified women, including Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Louise Arbour, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Helen Clark and Tarja Halonen^[10]. Equality Now also noted that there are many qualified Asian women, including Aung San Suu Kyi from Burma, Sadako Ogata from Japan, Nafis Sadik from Pakistan, Anson Chan from Hong Kong, and Leticia Shahani from the Philippines.^[11]. The idea of a female Secretary-General received some support (including from Kofi Annan^[12] and US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton^[13]), but no Asian women were nominated.

Nominees

Seven candidates were officially nominated for the position:^[14]

• - Jayantha Dhanapala (nominated by Sri Lanka; withdrew from race on 29 September)
• - Shashi Tharoor (nominated by India; withdrew from race on 2 October)
• - Ashraf Ghani (nominated by Afghanistan; withdrew from race on 4 October)
• - HRH Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein (nominated by Jordan; withdrew from race on 4 October)
• - Surakiart Sathirathai (nominated by Thailand; withdrew from race on 5 October)
• - Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga (nominated by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; withdrew from race on 5 October)
• - Ban Ki-moon (nominated by South Korea)

A number of other potential candidates were mentioned by commentators but did not run, including Bill Clinton (former President of the United States), Helen Clark (Prime Minister of New Zealand if not re-elected in 2005), Jean Chrétien (former Prime Minister of Canada), Anwar Ibrahim (former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia), Goh Chok Tong (Senior Minister of the Republic of Singapore), José Ramos Horta (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and then Prime Minister of East Timor), Aleksander Kwaśniewski (former President of Poland), and Tony Blair (Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom).^[14]

Election

The Security Council conducted four straw polls, on 24 July ^[15], 14 September ^[16], 28 September ^[17] and 2 October ^[18] in which each of the 15 member states were asked whether they would ‘encourage’ or ‘discourage’ each of the official candidates (or if they had ‘no opinion’ on the candidate). Ban Ki-moon topped each of these polls. In the fourth poll, Ban emerged as the only candidate with the support of all five permanent members, each of whom has the power to veto candidates. After the vote, Shashi Tharoor, who finished second, withdrew his candidacy^[19] and China's Permanent Representative to the UN told reporters that "it is quite clear from today's straw poll that Minister Ban Ki-moon is the candidate that the Security Council will recommend to the General Assembly".^[20]

Zeid and Ghani withdrew from the race on 4 October ^[21]. They were followed on 5 October by Surakiart and Vīķe-Freiberga, leaving only Ban in the race.^[22] The Security Council conducted a formal vote on 9 October, and forwarded its choice to the General Assembly, which then elected him on 13 October ^[23].

See also

• Reform of the United Nations
• UN General Assembly
• UN Security Council
• Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations
• UN Economic and Social Council
• UN Trusteeship Council
• UN Secretariat
• International Court of Justice
• United Nations System
• Global democracy
• Mundialization
• Presidential election
• League of Nations
• World government
• World presidentialism

References

External links

• U.N. Secretary-General webpage
  • Special and Personal Representatives and Envoys of the Secretary-General
  • How is the Secretary-General appointed?
• Global Policy Forum - UN Secretary-General

2006 selection process

• Report on the process of appointing a new Secretary-General
• Who will be the next Secretary General?
• UNSGselection.org - a campaign for a more democratic selection process

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