Security Council challenged on Annan successor

By Mark Turner
April 18, 2006
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/74c28f52-cf13-11da-925d-0000779e2340.html

The United Nations Security Council will on Wednesday face a challenge to its monopoly on choosing a successor to Kofi Annan, the outgoing secretary-general.
At a General Assembly meeting, disgruntled second-tier nations will ask why the 15-member Council – and in particular the US, China, France, Russia and Britain – should secretly control the most important decision the organisation faces this year.
Mr Annan’s term ends this year and UN members hope to choose a successor by September or October.
The UN’s top official is traditionally chosen by the Security Council behind closed doors, with the 191-member General Assembly relegated to rubber-stamping the decision.
Canada has spearheaded calls for a fairer process, saying recently: “The lack of transparency and inclusiveness of the exercise has become increasingly notice-able, and the UN process compares poorly with the practices of other international organisations.”
Jan Eliasson, president of the UN General Assembly and the incoming Swedish foreign minister, told the FT there was a “strong sense” that the General Assembly’s role should become “more meaningful and more substantial than in earlier elections”.
“I find it in the interests of the UN, and the next secretary-general, [that he or she] be appointed with as much legitimacy as possible,” he said.
New ideas include a process of hearings, briefings by candidates to regional groups, or “off-campus’ seminars in UN-affiliated think- tanks.
There are also calls for the General Assembly to be given more than one candidate to choose from, or to be allowed to ask the Security Council to nominate an alternative candidate.
The permanent five are trying to be sympathetic towards these sentiments with promises of greater transparency without surrendering the current wording in the UN charter, which dictates that “the secretary-general shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council”.
In theory, this leaves room for greater General Assembly involvement. However, a 1946 resolution determined the Security Council should offer only one name, and that any debate on the nomination should be avoided.
As a result, the General Assembly has had little influence over the choice of secretaries-general for most of its history, although in 1950 it extended the term of the secretary-general Trygve Lie without a recommendation from the Security Council.
In recent weeks, the Security Council has started to brief the General Assembly president on its deliberations, hoping to stave off calls for more radical reform.
“This is a consensus-building process. We have to forget about the cold war mentality,” says Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador and current president of the Security Council. However, he maintains that the charter makes it clear that the Security Council should “play the key role”.
Privately, many diplomats fear it is already too late to introduce any real change this time round, and that genuine reform will need to wait until 2011.
Many also expect that the decision over Mr Annan’s successor will be dominated by the US and China, particularly as the post is expected to go to an Asian.