On 7 May, the President of the General Assembly (PGA), Volkan Bozkır, held an informal dialogue between member states and António Guterres in his capacity as a candidate for the position of Secretary-General for the term beginning in January 2022.
With the exception of the duration, the format remained broadly similar to the dialogues held five years ago during the previous selection process, which many commentators described as the “job interview in front of the world”. While each 2016 candidate dialogue lasted roughly two hours, this 2021 dialogue lasted over three hours.
During his 10 minute introduction, Mr Guterres referred to his vision statement, “Restoring trust and inspiring hope”, before speaking of his personal motivations for standing for a second term, including his desire to work on “addressing the root causes of war, underdevelopment and violence” and making the case that this is not only the right thing to do, but “also the smart thing to do”. He stated: “there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems, the solutions are always political”.
Mr Guterres responded comprehensively to the array of questions from states and groups of states, many of which began by welcoming the practice of informal candidate dialogues as a centerpiece of the reforms achieved in 2015-16. During the wide ranging discussion, Mr Guterres called for an emergency task force to create a global plan for sharing COVID-19 vaccines as well as indicating his support for a new mechanism to broaden civil society engagement with the UN.
Civil society questions were collected ahead of the event through a form on the PGA’s website to create a shortlist of video questions from which six questions were due to be put to Mr Guterres interspersed throughout the dialogue. A nice touch - and a nod towards the transparency applied to the process by the PGA - at the beginning of the dialogue Mr Guterres selected at random the six civil society questions from the shortlist that he would be posed by picking six numbers out of a box.
Unfortunately, despite the significant time allowance for the meeting, just two of the six civil society questions were asked during the dialogue due to the session running over time. The four additional questions from civil society, as well as a number of outstanding questions from states were answered by Mr Guterres in writing following the session.
While 1 for 7 Billion welcomes the efforts to include questions from civil society in the General Assembly informal dialogue and believes it is important that civil society plays a part in this central element to the selection process, we note the limitations of the format. In future, further proposals should be considered to increase interactivity and reduce the formulaic nature of the event. This could include, for example, encouraging greater collaboration between member states on questions to avoid repetition and to structure the flow of the dialogue, and encouraging shorter answers from candidates, leaving room for states and civil society to ask (live) follow-up questions. In addition, given the significant and legitimate public interest in this process and the widespread support for the idea by states and civil society alike, we call on future PGAs to facilitate global townhall meetings with candidates during future processes. We also hope that candidates would agree to take part in civil society events and media interviews, as they did in 2016.
Image: The General Assembly holds an informal dialogue with a candidate for the position of Secretary-General. UN Secretary-General António Guterres speaks at the meeting. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe