"Of course, there will be a need for a quick decision on my successor and I hope there are a number of excellent candidates and the Austrian chairmanship is working on that. Time is short and I hope that they will manage in a few days to come to an agreement on the candidate because that would be a key for the proper functioning of the organization," Zannier said.
By the end of June, Zannier's mandate will expire. Therefore, any OSCE participating state can nominate a candidate for the post. The decision on who will become the next secretary general has to be made by unanimous consensus of all 57 States.
The secretary general is appointed for a term of three years by the OSCE Ministerial Council, the central decision-making and governing body of the OSCE. The official may then be re-elected for a second and final term of three years.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed Voronkov as Under-Secretary-General of newly created UN Counter-terrorism office.
"It is obvious that terrorism is a phenomenon that we are facing increasingly and we need responses. It seems that the UN is responding very well on this. I have seen that it has been very recently an appointment of an excellent Russian representative as a new counterterrorism person in the UN. Here, in the OSCE, we interact very closely with the United Nations and we are looking at how to facilitate the implementation of the UN conventions in the OSCE space," Zannier said.
