The Preparatory Commission that worked to create the United Nations after its Charter was adopted in 1945 noted in its final report the importance of the Secretariat. “While the responsibility for the framing and adoption of agreed international policies rests with the organs representative of the Members” it said, “the essential tasks of preparing the ground for those decisions and of executing them in cooperation with the Members will devolve largely upon the Secretariat. The manner in which the Secretariat performs these tasks will largely determine the degree in which the objectives of the Charter will be realized.” The Commission stressed the importance of the person who would head the Secretariat: “The United Nations cannot prosper, nor can its aims be realized without the active and steadfast support of the peoples of the world. The aims and activities of the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council É will, no doubt, be represented before the public primarily by the Chairmen of these organs. But the Secretary-General, more than anyone else, will stand for the United Nations as a whole. In the eyes of the world, no less than in the eyes of his own staff, he must embody the principles and ideals of the Charter to which the Organization seeks to give effect.”

Such a conception of the top official of an international secretariat was a historically significant innovation. The two generations of international organizations that preceded the United Nations — the early technical bodies that dealt with such things as postal, telegraphic and meteorological services, and the later League of Nations — had never envisaged such a role for its top official. The technical bodies were run by faceless functionaries; the League had highly regarded political leadership in the person of its first Secretary-General, Eric Drummond of Britain, but it was not the prestige of office that won respect as much as his personal merit and the super-Power standing of his country. His successor, Joseph Avenol of France, quickly dropped into disregard, helping the process along by toadying to the rising Fascist powers; when he resigned in 1940 it was little noted and not long remembered.

The United Nations Charter does not spell out the role of the Secretary-General. Article 97 says he is the “chief administrative officer” of the Organization (not merely of the Secretariat). Article 98 broadens that role by saying that he may be entrusted with “other functions” by the main intergovernmental bodies. And Article 99 authorizes him to bring to the attention of the Security Council “any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.” This provision of the Charter, the UN Preparatory Commission said, gave the Secretary-General “a quite special right which goes beyond any power previously accorded to the head of an international organization.” The “responsibility it confers É will require the exercise of the highest qualities of political judgment, tact and integrity.”

Such empowerment reflected a fundamental shift in the aims of international organization. Where the League of Nations had been conceived essentially as an organization that would help preserve the balance of power among major powers, the United Nations was based on the concept of collective security — the joint use of force in the general interest. That meant a very significant reduction of the traditional “right” of sovereign States to conduct war. Where the Covenant of the League had obligated members “to respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members,” the UN Charter enjoined a much broader code, applicable not just to members with existing political independence, but to all people. After including “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” among the “Purposes” of the Organization (Article 1), the Charter says in Article 2: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”

In the economic and social field, the UN Charter and the articles of agreement of the International Monetary Fund, represented an equally significant cession of sovereignty. The Commission on Human Rights is the only subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council mentioned in the Charter, and it provided the institutional framework that has allowed the United Nations to bring onto the international agenda matters that were once considered entirely within domestic jurisdiction. The IMF required governments to peg the values of their currency by an internationally agreed standard, internationalizing decisions once considered to be at the heart of economic sovereignty. Overall, the United Nations system envisaged the creation of an international order in which many of the Hobbesian attributes of sovereignty were constrained by the rule of law.

To push its core concept of collective security, the UN Charter required a truly independent Secretariat. Article 100 is a historically unprecedented injunction, in two parts. The first says: “In the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization. They shall refrain from any action which might reflect on their position as international officials responsible to the Organization.” The second part of the Article reads: “Each member of the United Nations undertakes to respect the exclusively international character of the responsibilities of the Secretary-General and the staff and not to seek to influence them in the discharge of their responsibilities.”

The UN Preparatory Commission observed in its report that the Secretariat envisaged in Article 100 “cannot be composed, even in part, of national representatives responsible to governments. For the duration of their appointments, the Secretary-General and the staff will not be the servants of the state of which they are nationals, but the servants only of the United Nations.” It went on to state a corollary requirement: “It is essential that officials should be inspired by a sense of loyalty to the United Nations and devotion to the ideal for which it stands, and that they should develop an esprit de corps and a habit of daily cooperation with persons of other countries and cultures. Loyalty to the Organization is in no way incompatible with an official’s attachment to his own country, whose higher interest he is serving in serving the United Nations. It clearly involves, however, a broad international outlook and a detachment from narrow prejudices and narrow national interests.”

The history of the United Nations has been one of constant tension between the ideals of its Charter and the realities of power in a world of unequal sovereignties. For the first four decades, implementation of the Charter was also distorted by the murderous ideological struggle of the "Cold War". As Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali said in a little noticed report titled An Agenda for Democratization, (issued on his own initiative in 1996):

    “On one side of the global ideological confrontation were States which claimed to have peace and democracy at home, and which supported peoples’ calls for self-determination and democratization abroad. Yet these States often misappropriated the name of democracy and acted in drastically undemocratic ways. On the other side were States which endeavoured to maintain peace and democracy at home and to promote those objectives within other States. Yet these States often supported authoritarian regimes, on the grounds that those regimes opposed communism and defended market freedoms, or used non-democratic means to achieve their foreign policy goals. The actions of both sides seemed to suggest a belief that peace and democracy within States could be achieved by war and non-democracy among States. The "Cold War" thus interrupted the project of democratic international organization begun by the founders. Throughout the decades of this confrontation, many of the major decisions of international peace and security were taken outside the United Nations and managed within the context of a non-democratic system, the bipolar system. The principle of self-determination was usurped and manipulated. International law became a casualty. The bright prospects for democracy within and among States soon faded to a faint glow.”

Power-Grab at San Francisco: At the San Francisco conference that negotiated the United Nations Charter, small and medium States tried unsuccessfully to give the General Assembly the power to pick the Secretary-General. They failed because the five Permanent members of the Security Council, arguing that no Secretary-General could be effective without their willing cooperation and support, insisted on having veto power over the selection. In effect, this constrained the unprecedented scope given by the United Nations Charter to the Secretary-General to pursue and promote the common interest of all member States.

The process by which the Permanent members agree on who should be Secretary-General has been deliberately shrouded. At the recommendation of the UN Preparatory Commission (which worked after the June 1945 adoption of the Charter to establish the United Nations), the Security Council has always consulted and decided on the nomination of the Secretary-General at “private” meetings that have no public record except for brief, opaque communiques from its President. A single copy record of proceedings is maintained by the Secretary-General, but it is open to consultation only by representatives of States that participated in the meetings. The Council can authorize wider access to private records and even decide to make them public, but that has never been done. In researching this piece we discovered that the UN Secretariat has a detailed “non-paper” on the selection of the Secretary-General, but it too is available only to a very select circle. Our account (in the sections below) of what has happened over the years is patched together from scattered published material and first hand accounts of diplomats and Secretariat officials.


As readers of the following sections will see, the Charter concept of an independent and high-quality international civil service has been under continuous assault over the last six decades. As a result, the UN Secretariat can no longer be counted upon to provide rigorously honest analyses of global problems. That is a serious flaw, affecting fundamentally the integrity and independence of the Organization. Unless steps are taken to change this situation, the entire membership of the Organization will have to suffer the consequence