UNESCO Director-General Nomination kicks off Monday

CAIRO – 9 October 2017: The first round of UNESCO’s director-general nomination will start on Monday at 5:00 p.m. in the French capital Paris where seven candidates are running for office. Among these is Ambassador Moshira Khatab, the candidate from Egypt and Africa.

In the morning, the Executive Board – comprising 58 member states of the board having the right to vote – will hold a meeting to discuss the agenda before the secret ballot starts in the evening.

The winning candidate must obtain 30 votes, which is unlikely in the first round but possible by the fifth round, which is to be held on Friday. The candidates who amassed the highest number of votes in the fourth round will compete in the fifth.

The procedure of the nomination of the director-general of UNESCO goes as follows:
one of the candidates will be chosen via secret ballot in a vote that will be held during the board’s 202nd session in October 2017. His/her name will then be announced by the board’s chairman in the General Conference during its 39th session in November 2017.

Delegates to the General Conference “shall consider this nomination and then elect, by secret ballot, the person proposed by the Executive Board,” according to UNESCO’s website.



Other candidates are Audrey Azoulay (France), Polad Bülbüloglu (Azerbaijan), Juan Alfonso Fuentes Soria (Guatemala), Pham Sanh Chau (Vietnam), Qian Tang (China), and former Qatari Minister of Culture Hamad Abdul Aziz al-Kawari, who is currently the cultural affairs adviser to the Emir of Qatar.

States supporting Khattab

Egyptian-French Parliamentary Friendship Association declared on Sunday its support to Ambassador Moshira Khattab, a candidate for the post of UNESCO director-general, for her diplomatic history and her experience in many UNESCO fields.


On Friday, Iraq announced that it withdrew its nominee for the position, Saleh Mahdi al-Hasnawi, in favor of Khattab. On August 13, India announced its support for Khattab in the elections that will be held in October.

Among Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have expressed their support for Khattab’s nomination throughout the last three months.

Khattab’s biggest support came from Africa, as she has been nominated by 55 African countries – constituting all members of the African Union – at the African Summit in Addis Ababa in early July.

Among the 58 member states, 17 are African countries including Egypt, and three are Arab states; Morocco, Algeria, and Sudan. That is in addition to the three Arab states from Asia; Lebanon, Oman, and Qatar.

Khattab’s Portfolio

Khattab initiated and led a great campaign between 2003 and 2008 to raise awareness of the harmful and sometimes fatal effects of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a common practice in Africa. The campaign ended with the promulgation of a law incriminating the practice and penalizing offenders with prison time and a fine.




Khattab received a doctorate in Child’s Rights from Cairo University, in addition to a Master’s in International Relations from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the U.S. and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Cairo University's Faculty of Economics and Political Science.


She was ranked third in 2013 out of the five leading female human rights activists in the Middle East and North Africa.


Among Khattab’s eminent job positions are her diplomatic and ministerial duties as the former minister of family and population in Egypt, former assistant minister of foreign affairs, and ambassador of Egypt to the Republic of South Africa, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.


Serving in Egypt’s diplomatic missions in Australia, Hungary, Austria and the United Nations (New York and Vienna), she played a human rights activist role for advocating the rights of children and women, and she also served as former chair of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child based at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva.


Khattab experienced two profound transformations; one as ambassador to the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic during its historic dissolution (1992-1994), and two, as Egypt’s first ambassador to South Africa during its transformation to democracy under Nelson Mandela (1994-1999).