Secret votes and vetoes: How will the next UN chief be picked?

Detailed summary

With no frontrunner for the job, eight candidates are vying for the UN Security Council's recommendation.

Secret votes, coloured ballot papers, straw polls and backroom efforts to force a consensus — with the threat of powerful vetoes hanging over it all. These could be the contours of how boards of mubil-billion dollar corporations decide on contentious issues.

It’s also the way the United Nations picks its secretary-general, the person at the apex of a vast and sprawling machinery tasked with upholding fast-fraying international laws and practices.

That process is now barrelling towards a tense climax, with the UN Security Council holding multiple straw polls in a bid to select its new secretary-general by December 31, when incumbent Antonio Guterres must step down.

Eight candidates are in the fray — from Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan, the head of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the organisation’s trade body, and Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates minister of state for foreign affairs.

The UNSC recommends a candidate who gets nine votes without a veto from its five permanent members. The process ends after the UN General Assembly (UNGA) gives its seal of approval to that candidate.

The council has five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – who hold veto power.

Ten elected non-permanent members also make up the council. Bahrain, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Pakistan, Panama, and Somalia are the current UNSC members — non permanent members are elected by rotation every two years.

According to Article 97 of the UN Charter, the UNSC decides on a candidate and recommends them to the UNGA for a vote by all members.

There has never been a time when the council has picked a candidate who was voted down by the assembly, meaning that while, in theory, everyone has a say, the assembly have never gone against the 15-member security council.

Opening of the article, excerpted from Al Jazeera. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.