The re-election of Tedros will be formalized at the 75th World Health Assembly that the WHO will organize in May 2022.
The Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2017, is the only candidate presented to the election process of a new director general for the term that will begin in 2022, this UN agency confirmed today.
“Only one candidate has been proposed by member states until the September 23 deadline,” WHO stressed in a statement.
The 56-year-old Ethiopian expert, who will continue to lead the organization until 2027, has had to manage the WHO’s response to the worst global health crisis of the last century, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The re-election of Tedros, who was also his country’s Minister of Health and Foreign Affairs, will be formalized at the 75th World Health Assembly that the WHO will organize in May 2022, and the second term will officially begin on August 16.
The post of CEO can only be renewed once, so the maximum term of office is 10 years, a time that in the last two decades has only been completed by the Hong Kong-based Margaret Chan (2007-2017), Tedros’ predecessor in The charge.
Tedros’ nomination is supported, according to WHO, by 28 member states of the organization, including Germany and France (who had already publicly announced their support in September).
Other EU countries, although not the 27 as a whole, supported the proposal, including Spain, Austria, Denmark, Croatia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.
Typically, the candidacy for CEO is presented by the applicant’s country of origin, which in this case would be Ethiopia, but this has not been the case on this occasion.
Some observers attribute this fact to frequent statements by the director general in recent months critical of Ethiopia’s actions in the current conflict in the Tigray region, where Tedros’s own family comes from. (I)
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