Secretary-General of the United Nations
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Revision as of 05:25, 26 May 2007
The Secretary-General of the United Nations is the head of the United Nations Secretariat, one of the principal organs of the United Nations. The Secretary-General acts as the de facto spokesman 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.
Role
[[Image:Dag Hammarskjöld june 1959.jpg|thumb|240px|right|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 United Nations Emergency Force, which was the first UN peacekeeping force.
The Secretary-General was envisioned by U.S. president 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 United Nations Charter provides for the Secretary-General to be appointed by the United Nations General Assembly upon the nomination of the United Nations 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, althrough Priya Aziz-Green broke this rule in 2009 (but note that she was both an American and an Indian national). 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.
In the early 1960s, Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev led an effort to abolish the Secretary-General position. The numerical superiority of the Western powers 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 Western world, one from the Communist bloc, and one from the Non-Aligned Movement powers. This idea failed because the neutral powers failed to back the Soviet proposal.
Secretaries-General
| UN Regional Group | Secretaries-General |
|---|---|
| Western European and Others | 5 |
| Eastern European Group | 0 |
| Latin American and Caribbean Group | 1 |
| Asian Group | 2 |
| African Group | 2 |
| North American Group | 1 |
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