Security Council Selects Next UN Chief With Pressure For A Female Secretary-General

The United Nations Security Council selects a Secretary-General to replace Ban Ki-moon, then sends the name to the General Assembly for confirmation. Pressure is building for the

next UN chief, a job that is high on prestige but low on power, to be a woman.

      Pressure is also building for reform of the present secretive method for making the selection, which gives the veto-wielding Permanent Five of the Security Council total power over the process. The nominee must receive nine of the 15 Council votes,

but a veto from any one of the Permanent Five - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - means finding a new candidate. Reformers, who criticize the present process as backroom bargaining by the P5, want the world to have a say in the selection. They want a transparent process and formal selection criteria that includes a timetable for an adequate assessment of candidates. If pressure for a female chief gives the body its first female Secretary-General, then current speculation

is focused on a woman from Eastern Europe, a region that has never produced a UN leader. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and two Bulgarians - Irina Bokova, UNESCO's executive director, and Kristalina Ivanova Georgieva, a European commissioner, an economist, and a former World Bank vice president - are in the frame. Other women widely seen as suitable for the world's top diplomat job are Chile President Michelle Bachelet, Brazil President Dilma Rousseff, former New

Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and Italy's Federica Mogherini , the European Union's foreign minister. Eight men - from Norway, Sweden, Myanmar, Austria, Peru, Egypt, Ghana

and South Korea - have held the top job in the 70 years since the UN was founded.