Secretary-General of the United Nations
chief administrative officer and head of the United Nations
The secretary-general of the United Nations (UNSG or UNSECGEN) is the de facto head of the United Nations who oversees the United Nations Secretariat, one of the six principal organs of the United Nations, which also represents all 193 nations on the global stage. While the president of the Security Council chairs its meeting, the secretary-general acts as the council's executive officer who oversees the implementation of its decisions and mandates.
The role of the secretary-general and of the secretariat is laid out by Chapter XV (Articles 97 to 101) of the United Nations Charter. However, the office's qualifications, selection process and tenure are open to interpretation; they have been established by custom.
Selection and term of office
The secretary-general is appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. As the recommendation must come from the Security Council, any of the five permanent members of the council can veto a nomination. Most secretaries-general are compromise candidates from middle powers and have little prior fame.
Unofficial qualifications for the job have been set by precedent in previous selections. The appointee may not be a citizen of any of the Security Council's five permanent members. The General Assembly resolution 51/241 in 1997 stated that, in the appointment of "the best candidate", due regard should be given to regional (continental) rotation of the appointee's national origin and to gender equality, although no woman has yet served as secretary-general.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Secretary-General of the United Nations” is chief administrative officer and head of the United Nations. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Secretary-General, United and Nations, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q81066. VIAF identifies the subject as 131837931. The Library of Congress control number is n79063068. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Secretary-General of the United Nations” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.