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Portugal’s Guterres Poised To Be Next U.N. Secretary-General

Portugal’s Guterres Poised To Be Next U.N. Secretary-General

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres is poised to be the ninth United Nations Secretary-General and is expected to be formally recommended to the 193-member General Assembly for election by the Security Council on Thursday, diplomats said.

Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, president of the 15-member council for October, said he hoped the council would unanimously recommend Guterres, who was also the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from June 2005 to December 2015.

Guterres, 67, would replace Ban Ki-moon, 72, of South Korea, who will step down at the end of 2016 after serving two terms. Guterres was prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and also served as president of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005.

“Today after our sixth straw poll we have a clear favorite and his name is Antonio Guterres,” Churkin told reporters with his 14 council colleagues standing behind him on Wednesday.

“We wish Mr. Guterres well in discharging his duties as the Secretary-General of the United Nations for the next five years,” Churkin said.

The council has been holding informal secret ballots since July in a bid to reach consensus on a candidate. Members had the choices encourage, discourage or no opinion. Guterres has come out on top of all the polls and on Wednesday received 13 encourage votes and two no opinion votes.

“In the end, there was just a candidate whose experience, vision, and versatility across a range of areas proved compelling,” U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told reporters.

“If we have these trans national threats and we don’t have somebody at the helm of the United Nations that can mobilize coalitions, that can make the tools of this institution … work better for people, that’s going to be more pain and more suffering and more dysfunction than we can afford,” she said.

Diplomats said one of the no opinion votes was cast by one of the five veto wielding powers, which are Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain.

The Security Council will adopt a resolution, traditionally behind closed doors, recommending that the General Assembly appoint Guterres for a five-year term from Jan. 1, 2017. The resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes to pass.

“We hope it can be done by acclamation,” Churkin said.

Thirteen people were nominated in the race to become the next U.N. chief, but three had already withdrawn before Wednesday’s secret ballot. In a bid for more transparency in the opaque selection process, the candidates were for the first time able to make election campaign-style pitches to the General Assembly.

When Guterres spoke to the General Assembly in April, he said he was a candidate to become secretary-general because “the best place to address the root cause of human suffering is at the center of the U.N. system.” He spoke in English, French and Spanish during the two-hour long town hall meeting.

Guterres, a devout Catholic, spoke about his decade as the U.N. refugee chief as “an extraordinary privilege but a terrible frustration because there was no humanitarian solution for their plight.” He said the solution was always political.

He described a U.N. chief as “acting with humility, without arrogance, without giving lessons to anybody, but working as a convener, as a facilitator, as a catalyst and behaving like an honest broker, a bridge builder and a messenger for peace.”

Seven of the candidates for secretary-general were women amid a push by civil society groups and a third of the 193 U.N. member states for the first female U.N. chief in the 71-year history of the world body, which has had eight male leaders.

The WomanSG lobby group described the win by Guterres as “a disaster for equal rights and gender equality” and said it was an outrage that it appeared the female candidates were “never seriously considered.”

In April, Guterres pledged to present a roadmap for gender parity at all levels of the United Nations if elected.

Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft paid tribute to all the candidates and in particular the women.

“Although it’s high time for a woman … the most important thing for the UK was the qualities of leadership of this position,” he told reporters.

He said Guterres was the person to “provide a convening power and a moral authority at a time when the world is divided on issues, above all like Syria.”

The U.N. Director at Human Rights Watch, Louis Charbonneau, said: “Ultimately, the next U.N. secretary-general will be judged on his ability to stand up to the very powers that just selected him, whether on Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, the refugee crisis, climate change or any other problem that comes his way.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Grant McCool)

IMAGE: Antonio Guterres, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in Geneva, Switzerland December 18, 2015.  REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File photo

Secretary-General Says U.N. Has ‘Moral Responsibility’ To Help End Cholera Outbreak In Haiti

Secretary-General Says U.N. Has ‘Moral Responsibility’ To Help End Cholera Outbreak In Haiti

By Jacqueline Charles, The Miami Herald

UNITED NATIONS — In his strongest statement since a deadly cholera epidemic arrived in Haiti nearly four years ago, the head of the United Nations said the global body bears “a moral responsibility” in helping the Caribbean nation end the outbreak.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made the declaration in an interview as he prepared to visit Haiti, where he will travel to the region where the contamination happened and meet with families hard hit by cholera. Detected 10 months after Haiti’s Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, the waterborne disease has killed more than 8,500 people and infected 704,000.

Since then, the United Nations has refused to admit responsibility for cholera, which scientific evidence and its own independent panel of experts suggest was brought to Haiti by Nepalese troops stationed at a military base in the Central Plateau region.

Nor has the U.N. offered an apology, which victims and their families are seeking, along with compensation, in three different lawsuits filed in U.S. courts.

“Regardless of what the legal implication may be, as the secretary-general of the United Nations and as a person, I feel very sad,” Ban said. “I believe that the international community, including the United Nations, has a moral responsibility to help the Haitian people stem the further spread of this cholera epidemic.”

Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe called on the U.N. last fall to take “moral responsibility” for cholera, and after the U.N.’s independent human rights expert on Haiti earlier this year demanded “full compensation” for cholera victims. In the Feb. 7 report, Gustavo Gallon criticized the silence while publicly disagreeing with the U.N., which has rejected compensation and invoked immunity in the legal cases.

“The diplomatic difficulties surrounding this issue must be overcome to ensure the Haitian people that the epidemic can be stopped in the shortest possible time frame and pay full compensation for the damages suffered,” Gallon said.

By the U.N.’s admission, foreign donors have been slow to contribute to a $2.2 billion, ten-year cholera elimination campaign that Ban began in December 2012 with the presidents of Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic. The organization has struggled to even raise an initial $400 million it says is needed in the first two years to contain the epidemic and build clean water and sanitation infrastructure.

Getting donors will be a key focus during his visit, Ban said, noting that Haitians “have suffered a lot” under the world’s worst cholera epidemic. The way to prevent a repeat of cholera, he said, is to help Haiti address the root causes, poor sanitation.

“The international community has been struggling to overcome this global financial difficulty, and we have so many crises happening at the same time around the world,” said Ban. “That is one reason why we have not been able to effectively mobilize.”

And while the humanitarian crises have also put pressure on Ban to reduce the size of the military mission in Haiti, observers say they believe donors are holding back for other reasons.

Some blame Haiti fatigue, which has some donors reassessing and reducing financial aid to the country. Others say the U.N.’s refusal to accept that leaking sewage pipes at its base were to blame for cholera spreading, is also a factor.

There is also Haiti’s ongoing political gridlock, which continues to threaten the staging of long-overdue local and legislative elections in October.

With every disagreement, observers say, Haiti’s politicians get further from reaching a compromise for the elections.

“My political message to Haitian leaders, government and parliamentary leaders, will be that it’s crucially important that this election be held as agreed and scheduled in October,” Ban said.

Photo: Thomas Hawk via Flickr