The
Secretary-General of the United Nations, acronym
UNSYG, is the head of the
Secretariat, one of the principal organs of the
United Nations. The Secretary-General also acts as the
de facto spokesperson and leader of the United Nations.
The current Secretary-General is Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, who took office on 1 January 2007. His first term will expire on 31 December 2011, and he will be eligible for reappointment.
Role
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 five-story
townhouse in the
Sutton Place neighborhood of
Manhattan in
New York City,
New York,
United States. The townhouse was built for
Anne Morgan in 1921, and donated to the United Nations in 1972.
Term and selection
Secretaries-General serve for five-year terms that can be renewed indefinitely, although none so far has held office for more than two 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 U.N. Charter's terse language has since been supplemented by other procedural rules and also 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 (continental) rotation has also been adopted in the selection of successive candidates. 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
Sir Anthony Eden were considered for the first Secretary-General position, but were rejected in favor of the uncontroversial
Norwegian Trygve Lie. Due to
international politics and the 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, such as the
election of Popes in the
Roman Catholic Church, or the Premier of the former
Soviet Union.
Dag Hammarskjöld remains the only Secretary-General to have 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.
See also
