Is the UN Ready for a Non-Renewable 7-YearTerm for the Secretary-General?

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 19 2025 (IPS) – A long-standing proposal going back to 1996—to establish a single non-renewable seven-year term for the Secretary-General of the United Nations—has been resurrected by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The original proposal was part of a study sponsored by the Dag Hammarskjold and Ford Foundations. According to the proposal, the seven-year term “ would give the SG the opportunity to undertake far-reaching plans free from undesirable pressures.”

Ban has said a single, nonrenewable seven-year term will strengthen the independence of the office. The current practice of two five-year terms, he said, leaves Secretaries-General “overly dependent on this Council’s Permanent Members for an extension.”

A former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt was deprived of a second five-year term when the US was the only permanent member state to veto his second term despite the fact that he received 14 of the 15 votes in the Security Council.

As the highest policy-making organ of the United Nations, and as the ultimate appointing body, the General Assembly should adopt a comprehensive resolution establishing a single seven-year term and all key features of an improved process of appointing the Secretary-General,” the study said.

The same seven-year term, according to the 1996 study authored by Sir Brian Urquhart and Erskine Childers, should also apply to heads of UN agencies and UN programmes.

The study was titled “A World in Need of Leadership: Tomorrow’s United Nations. A Fresh Appraisal.” Sir Brian was a former UN Under-Secretary-General (USG) for Special Political Affairs and Childers was a former Senior Advisor to the UN Director-General for Development and International Economic Affairs.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations and Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN, told IPS that, in keeping with the best interest of the operational credibility of the world’s most universal multilateral body with a global mandate, and as a conscientious UN insider, “I believe very strongly and quite comfortably that there is substantive merit in the long-standing, but surprisingly undervalued, proposal to establish a single non-renewable seven-year term of office for the Secretary-General of the United Nations.”

………………………………………………………………………………………….. Recounting his IPS op-ed, Ambassador Chowdhury said he had underscored that “Another important idea to ensure independence of the Secretary-General would be to make the office restricted to one term for each incumbent.”

The seven-year term is adequate for any leader worth the name to deliver positive results and show what can be achieved for any global institution. Any change in the tenure of office and in the re-election process will require the amendment of the UN Charter and therefore the concurrence of the P5, said Ambassador Chowdhury, initiator of the UNSCR 1325 as President of the UN Security Council in March 2000, Chairman of the UN General Assembly’s Main Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Matters and Founder of the Global Movement for The Cultural of Peace (GMCoP).

On 30 October 2023, in another op-ed in IPS, Ambassador Chowdhury recommended that “… in the future the Secretary-General would have only one term of seven years, as opposed to the current practice of automatically renewing the Secretary-General’s tenure for a second five-year term, without even evaluating his performance.”

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