Former Portuguese PM Guterres poised to become next UN chief

Former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres is poised to succeed Ban Ki-moon as UN secretary general after all 15 members of the Security Council agreed to his selection.

Guterres, who served as the the UN's high commissioner for refugees from 2010 until 2015, still needs to be approved by the 192-member General Assembly.

He was elected Portugal’s prime minister in 1998 and held the office for four years.

As UN chief, Guterres has to face Europe's biggest refugee crisis since World War II and multiple conflicts in the Middle East, including the Syrian war, where UN efforts to secure a peace agreement over the past five years have failed.

“Syria has become the great tragedy of this century - a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history,” Guterres said when he was head of the UN refugee agency in 2013.

In an interview with the UN News Centre in 2014, he said the eventual solution for the refugee crisis must be political.

“I think it’s absolutely essential that the international community shows more solidarity with refugee-hosting countries,” Guterres said. “Eighty-six percent of refugees in the world live in developing countries and the truth is that many of these host countries that have so generously opened their borders, often more generously than the developed countries, are not receiving the adequate solidarity from the international community.”

Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters on Wednesday that Guterres emerged as a clear favourite to become the top UN diplomat.

"We have decided to go to a formal vote tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock, and we hope it can be done by acclamation," he said.

Israel welcomed the Security Council’s support for the former Portuguese prime minister.

"I hope that this change in leadership will bring an end to the organisation’s hostility towards the Jewish state,” Israel's ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said in a statement.

In 2014, the UN refugee agency published a report on stateless people that omitted Palestinians.

Guterres said then that Palestinians have a specific situation that requires a “political solution”.