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RoleImage:Dag Hammarskjöld june 1959.jpg 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 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.
Term and selectionSecretaries-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.
Secretaries-General
2006 selectionWhen 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 [1]. Noting that all Secretary-Generals 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 [2]. Equality Now also noted that there are many qualified Asian women, including Aung San Suu Kyi from Myanmar, Sadako Ogata from Japan, Nafis Sadik from Pakistan, Anson Chan from Hong Kong, and Leticia Shahani from the Philippines [3]. The idea of a female Secretary-General received some support (including from Kofi Annan [4] and US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton [5]), but no Asian women were nominated. NomineesSeven candidates were officially nominated for the position: [6]
A number of other potential candidates were mentioned by commentators but did not run, including Bill Clinton (former President of the United States), 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 Prime Minister of East Timor), Aleksander Kwaśniewski (former President of Poland), and Tony Blair (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) [7]. ElectionThe Security Council conducted four straw polls, on 24 July [9], 14 September [10], 28 September [11] and 2 October [12] 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[13] 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’. [8] Zeid and Ghani withdrew from the race on 4 October [14]. They were followed on 5 October by Surakiart and Vīķe-Freiberga, leaving only Ban in the race [9]. 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 [15]. See also
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