Press. voanews.com
Two clear front-runners have emerged from the pack of 12 candidates for
the next U.N. secretary-general, according to diplomats with knowledge of the
secret proceedings. Former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres and
Slovenia's former president, Danilo Turk, both garnered strong support from the
U.N. Security Council's 15 members on their first informal ballots Thursday to
select a new U.N. chief.
The council, which recommends a finalist to the General Assembly for
approval, is likely to hold several rounds of votes before making a final
decision. The winner will take over from Ban Ki-moon on Jan. 1, 2017. Both
front-runners have extensive U.N. experience, in addition to their political
backgrounds.
Guterres, 67, was his country's prime minister from 1995-2002 and went
on to become the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for a decade, leaving the
post last December. Under his leadership, the agency managed the largest
refugee and migrant crisis since World War II.
Turk, 64, of Slovenia, is a human rights lawyer who
was his country's head of state from 2007 to 2012. Before that, he served as
Slovenia's first U.N. ambassador and was the U.N. deputy political chief under
Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Eastern Europe has never held the top U.N. post and has entered eight
candidates in hopes of winning it. They had mixed results. Aside from
Slovenia's Turk, who is in second place in the vote count, diplomats said
Bulgaria's Irina Bokova, the head of UNESCO, came in third, followed closely by
Vuk Jeremic of Serbia and Srgjan Kerim of Macedonia.
At the bottom of the pack were the nominees from Montenegro, Moldova and
Croatia.
There has been a push by more than 50 member states this year to select
a woman to fill the top U.N. job. New Zealand's Helen Clark, who runs the U.N.
Development Program, and Argentina's Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra, placed
in the middle of the group, while Costa Rica's Christiana Figueres landed in
the bottom half.
Call for transparency
The results of the council's informal voting are not public. General
Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft, who has shaken up the process this year by
calling on governments to formally nominate their candidates and by holding
public job interviews with them, took to social media to criticize the council
for not making the poll results public.
"In my view, limiting the communication to the fact that the
informal straw poll has taken place without any further detail adds little
value and does not live up to the expectations of the membership and the new
standard of openness and transparency," he wrote on Twitter.
"We are not going to preview our position on the individual
candidates," U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told reporters on her way into
the vote. "But we made no secret of the fact that we're looking for
somebody with great leadership skills, great management skills, someone who has
a commitment to fairness and accountability, and who stays true to the founding
principles of the United Nations."
France's U.N. envoy François Delattre compared the council's secret
deliberations to the selection of the pope, "with the exception that the
observers say there is no smoke, white or black." He added that the
process is "critically important," and the council must make sure it
picks the best candidate. "It's about inspiring and projecting trust, and
making sure that the community of nations recognizes itself in the future
secretary-general," he said.
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