The UN needs to make its job selection process transparent
Alluding to the United Nations’opaque selection process for candidates to its key bodies, Sir Richard Dolly, ex Director of UNICEF, makes a candid admission: “There is a need for some process of open hearing and interview of the best qualified potential candidates.” The issue of selection cropped up when the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development announced the recruitment for the coveted post of secretary general. As per the UN’s cyclical selection process, the next man for the secretary general position to the UNCTAD must be from Africa. But, as is often the case, there is already a long queue in the run-up to the announcement of selection in September this year. Even curiouser, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has the power to select, has refused to divulge the details of the shortlisted candidates.
The UN has a particularly blemished record when it comes to the selection of candidates for its various arms and agencies. The IMF and the World Bank too have a similar dismal record of recruitment, which they try to defend under the garb of “gentlemen’s agreement.” According to the agreement, the head of the IMF and the World Bank must either be an American or a European. That's a brazen display of economic and racial apartheid. Despite wide-ranging agreement among its members to drop the discriminatory policy, these bodies have not budged and obnoxious policy has endured to this day. What's even more exacerbating is that the rules of selection at these two apex bodies remain a closed-door exercise, with no information shared beyond their cloistered foyers.
It seems that in the matter of selection of candidates for UNCTAD, Ban Ki-Moon is drawing his strategy from history, even though there is a need for adopting a new tack. According to Sir Dolly, eminent experts in the field like the Nobel laureate Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, an American economist and professor at Columbia University, and Jose Antonio Ocampo, former Under-Secretary-General of UN, ought to be in Moon’s selection panel. Though Moon ought to pay heed to what these respectable voices have been urging him to do, he has the luxury of acting unilaterally. Never in the history of the United Nations, a secretary general’s choice of selection has been rejected on the floor of the house.
Should the UN persist with its one-man show when it comes to the selection of key personnel. At a time when there is a cry for greater transparency and democratisation in decision making, the UN has a duty to lead by example. It is therefore all the more desirable that it should jettison its hidebound process of selection and recruitment and embrace a more democratic style that befits its reputation and credentials.
Alluding to the United Nations’opaque selection process for candidates to its key bodies, Sir Richard Dolly, ex Director of UNICEF, makes a candid admission: “There is a need for some process of open hearing and interview of the best qualified potential candidates.” The issue of selection cropped up when the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development announced the recruitment for the coveted post of secretary general. As per the UN’s cyclical selection process, the next man for the secretary general position to the UNCTAD must be from Africa. But, as is often the case, there is already a long queue in the run-up to the announcement of selection in September this year. Even curiouser, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has the power to select, has refused to divulge the details of the shortlisted candidates.
The UN has a particularly blemished record when it comes to the selection of candidates for its various arms and agencies. The IMF and the World Bank too have a similar dismal record of recruitment, which they try to defend under the garb of “gentlemen’s agreement.” According to the agreement, the head of the IMF and the World Bank must either be an American or a European. That's a brazen display of economic and racial apartheid. Despite wide-ranging agreement among its members to drop the discriminatory policy, these bodies have not budged and obnoxious policy has endured to this day. What's even more exacerbating is that the rules of selection at these two apex bodies remain a closed-door exercise, with no information shared beyond their cloistered foyers.
It seems that in the matter of selection of candidates for UNCTAD, Ban Ki-Moon is drawing his strategy from history, even though there is a need for adopting a new tack. According to Sir Dolly, eminent experts in the field like the Nobel laureate Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, an American economist and professor at Columbia University, and Jose Antonio Ocampo, former Under-Secretary-General of UN, ought to be in Moon’s selection panel. Though Moon ought to pay heed to what these respectable voices have been urging him to do, he has the luxury of acting unilaterally. Never in the history of the United Nations, a secretary general’s choice of selection has been rejected on the floor of the house.
Should the UN persist with its one-man show when it comes to the selection of key personnel. At a time when there is a cry for greater transparency and democratisation in decision making, the UN has a duty to lead by example. It is therefore all the more desirable that it should jettison its hidebound process of selection and recruitment and embrace a more democratic style that befits its reputation and credentials.
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