THE LEGAL STATUS OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL LAW: PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Abstract

This article examines the legal status of the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) as codified in Articles 97–101 of the UN Charter and as it has actually developed through eight decades of institutional practice. The office was drafted at San Francisco in 1945 in essentially administrative language, yet it has evolved into a hybrid position combining the functions of chief administrative officer, international civil servant, diplomatic mediator, and, on rare occasions, an autonomous political actor invoking Article 99 of the Charter. Using formal-dogmatic, historical-legal, and case-study methods, the article identifies four structural problems of the contemporary status of the Secretary-General: (1) the unresolved doctrinal tension between the administrative and political readings of the office; (2) the “chilling effect” that the politics of appointment and reappointment exerts on the independence guaranteed by Article 100; (3) the absence of any formal mechanism of accountability or removal short of non-reappointment or resignation; and (4) the growing dependence of the Secretariat on the voluntary and assessed contributions of a small number of powerful states. The analysis draws on the doctrinal positions of leading international lawyers — Hans Kelsen, Bruno Simma, Simon Chesterman, Leland Goodrich, Henry Schermers and Niels Blokker, Chittharanjan Amerasinghe, José Alvarez, David Malone, Edward Luck — as well as on Uzbek and Russian doctrine (Akmal Saidov, Igor Lukashuk, Grigory Tunkin), and is illustrated by concrete cases, from Dag Hammarskjöld’s Congo operation and the 1994 failure to act on Rwanda to António Guterres’s invocation of Article 99 over Gaza in December 2023 and the ongoing 2025–2026 selection of the tenth Secretary-General, which the authors of this article treat as a live empirical test of the reforms adopted since 2015. On the basis of this analysis, the article proposes a package of de lege ferenda solutions: a single non-renewable term of office, codified and reasoned Security Council recommendations, an independent ethics mechanism compatible with Article 100, an institutionalised “early-warning” unit to reduce the political cost of invoking Article 99, and diversification of the Organisation’s financial base.