UN migration agency rejects Trump nominee, to have 1st non- American chief in decades
Decades of American leadership at UN agency broken
Geneva, June 29: Decades of American leadership at the United Nations migration agency was broken on Friday as voters rejected President Donald Trump's nominee for director general, electing Portuguese politician Antonio Vitorino instead.
The International Organisation for Migration ( IOM) had been led by an American throughout the agency's 67- year history with one exception from 1961 to 1969.
But Trump's pick Ken Isaacs, an executive with the Christian charity Samaritan's Purse who faced serious charges of anti- Muslim bigotry, proved to be an untenable choice.
Mr Vitorino, 61, won by acclamation after Isaacs was knocked out of the race and the third candidate, current IOM deputy chief Laura Thompson, stood aside after seeing no path to victory.
Mr Vitorino, who served as Portugal's deputy prime minister and defence minister in the mid- 1990s, will have a powerful friend inside the UN when he takes over IOM on October 1: his boss in Lisbon was Antonio Guterres, the current UN secretary general.
Mr Vitorino also served as the European justice commissioner from 1999 to 2004, and his win will likely be seen as a boon to Brussels as the European Union painstakingly tries to forge united approach to migration challenges. But the result is a clear repudiation of Trump, whose hardline stance and inflammatory rhetoric towards migrants undermined Washington's traditional right to choose the world's top migration official.