Antonio Guterres, the 67-year-old former secretary of Socialist International, will succeed Ban Ki-moon on January 1, 2017.
Antonio Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, will be the next UN secretary general, after the UN Security Council agreed he should replace Ban Ki-moon at the beginning of next year, according to The Guardian.
All 15 ambassadors from the Security Council emerged from the sixth in a series of straw polls to announce that they had agreed on Guterres, who was UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade.
Guterres’s margin of victory was decisive. He reportedly won 13 votes in his support and two abstentions, with no one voting against him.
The second-place candidate, the Slovak Miroslav Lajcak, had seven votes in support and six against him – two of them vetoes from permanent council members.
As the UN’s refugee chief, Guterres persistently appealed to the conscience of the international community over the worst refugee crisis since the World War II, and he vowed to carry on being a spokesman for the downtrodden if he became UN secretary general.
The Telegraph reports the UN has so far been unable to galvanize support for any significant solutions to the problem, described as the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. The UNHCR – which Mr. Guterres ran until December – estimates that 34,000 people are forced from their homes every day, and there are now 21.3 million refugees, half of them children.
