The United States-Israeli war against Iran has propelled Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, into the spotlight as the face of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, but it has also highlighted some concerns about how he is conducting his campaign to succeed António Guterres as UN secretary-general for the 2027-2031 term.
The director-general of the Vienna-based IAEA, as it’s known, is remaining in the post while he campaigns for the UN’s top job this year, despite the exhortation of member states that all candidates in the race “holding positions in the UN system should consider suspending their work . . . with a view to avoiding any conflict of interest that may arise from their functions and adjacent advantages.”
The language was contained in both the 2025 General Assembly “revitalization” Resolution 79/327 and a Nov. 25, 2025 joint letter written by the respective presidents of the Assembly and the Security Council, announcing that nominations for the secretary-general post were open. The letter was based on the resolution and was drafted with the consensus of the 15 Council members.
Argentine President Javier Milei nominated Grossi the next day. Asked by PassBlue at the time whether he would comply with the wish expressed in the letter, Grossi said in an email on Dec.1: “I may recall that neither the General Assembly Resolution 79/327 nor the joint letter of the presidents of the UNGA and the UNSC of November 25 set an obligation to suspend work, but only to consider [his emphasis] the issue.
“Consequently, I have seriously considered the matter and, in view of the nature and responsibilities of my position, I must continue my work. I have informed the Board of Governors of the IAEA accordingly.”
Grossi did not respond to a further email from PassBlue asking him to elaborate on this matter and about how he would ensure funding for his secretary-general campaign was kept separate from his official IAEA work.
The joint letter of Nov. 25 did not spell out the potential conflicts of interest, but chief among them is that high-ranking UN officials whose duties require them to travel extensively and meet government leaders routinely would enjoy a tremendous advantage over candidates campaigning from outside the UN system, who would have to fund all their own travel and other expenses.
On March 4, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan formally entered the UN race and announced that she would step down as secretary-general of the UN Trade and Development agency, complying with the Assembly resolution and joint letter.
Asked if he felt he should follow Grynspan’s example and if he understood the concern about conflicts of interest, Grossi told PassBlue on March 8: “Regarding other candidates, I would not be able to comment on their own particular circumstances, nor on the timing of the submissions of their candidatures.” He said he had nothing more to add to his email of Dec. 1 to PassBlue.
Three other people have announced their candidacies: Michelle Bachelet, a former two-time president of Chile and UN high commissioner for human rights; Macky Sall, an ex-president of Senegal; and Virginia Gamba, an Argentine who most recently directed the UN’s Children and Armed Conflict office.
A former senior official in the UN Secretariat, who asked not to be identified, told PassBlue that Assembly President Annalena Baerbock drafted the original version of the Nov. 25 letter, which was then “boiled down considerably” by the Security Council.
“It’s significant that with all they cut, they left that [conflict of interest] provision in the letter. Whenever the Security Council president sends a letter, it has to have consensus of all 15 members. So, the fact that all 15 united behind retaining that paragraph is significant,” the former official said.
In the open
Until 2016, when Guterres won selection of UN secretary-general among 13 candidates, the process of choosing the UN leader was conducted largely behind closed doors. Only two secretaries-general, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru and Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, had come from within the UN system.
The process was opened significantly when it came time to choose a successor to Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean, thanks to concerted effort mostly by civil society groups with cooperation from the then-General Assembly president, Mogens Lykketoft, a Dane. Yet, the choice wound down to opaque maneuvering by the permanent Council members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the US.
Ten years ago, there was no suggestion that candidates within the system step down while campaigning, but it was “no accident” that they have been urged to do so this time around. “In 2016, right up to the end, those who were working in the system continued to work all the way through their candidacies, and members did not feel that was appropriate,” the former UN official said.
“Frankly, there was unseemly lobbying by some heads of UN entities, who were trying to get the work of their entity more engaged in what was going on in New York to raise their profile for the appointment process,” the source said.
This person also dismissed Grossi’s statement that he could not step down because of the crucial nature of his role. “If you’re doing your work right, you have qualified deputies. His team should be able to handle it.”
But Sam Daws, who was first officer in Annan’s executive office, from June 2000 to June 2003, questioned whether the Assembly resolution asking candidates to step down applied to Grossi.
“The IAEA is part of the UN Chief Executive’s Board for Coordination. But in various system charts, there’s a dotted line to the IAEA and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” Daws told PassBlue in a call. “So, they are referred to in many UN organigrams and handbooks as ‘related organizations.’”
Daws compared the UN to the solar system, where the funds and programs operated in orbits close to the Secretariat core and the specialized agencies were located farther out “in a kind of Uranus orbit.” Even farther out were the IAEA and OPCW.
“They are part of the broader UN family, but they’re not part of the core UN system,” Daws, who co-authored “The Procedure of the UN Security Council” and co-edited “The Oxford Handbook of the UN,” said.
UN money?
The chair of the Campaign to Elect a Woman UN Secretary General, Jean Krasno, who is a political science lecturer at the City College of New York, told PassBlue in a call: “If you are traveling and campaigning on UN money, that is counter to the equal treatment of other candidates who are raising their own money. That was the concern of the member states. It does make it an unfair element of the campaign.”
Grossi, as director-general of the IAEA, with its key role in such issues as assessing Iran’s nuclear program and ensuring the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, is likely to feature prominently on the radars of the five veto-wielding members (P5) of the Security Council, whose approval is imperative for a prospective secretary-general.
Krasno said that in the past, Grossi had caused concern by appearing “in a quiet way” to provide support for the US-Israeli case against Iran, “by saying shortly before the attacks in June last year that Iran was not in compliance [with its safeguards agreement] and so forth. But things we already knew, so why state it at that time?”
However, after President Trump and Israel launched their latest onslaught against Iran, on Feb. 28, Grossi had said all the right things, she noted.
“Most countries around the world, including the US public, do not support this war,” Krasno said, adding about Grossi: “He’s in a dilemma because if he supports the war he gets pushback from many member states; if he doesn’t support the war, he may lose the support of the US for his candidacy for secretary-general.”
Krasno said Grossi’s call for restraint on March 2, when he emphasized the danger of damaging nuclear power plants and appealed for diplomacy rather than force, showed that “he realizes he’s kind of in the hot seat here. . . . If he’s the leader of the IAEA, he has to support its goals, otherwise it looks really terrible. And would jeopardize him being approved by other members of the P5.”
The former UN official quoted above in this article said a “number one concern” was the important role the IAEA has in ensuring there is no catastrophe at Zaporizhzhia, which sits at the front line of the war in Ukraine.
“In the past, Grossi has been rather firm with the Russians and has called them out; but one can now envisage a situation where there’s some new development at Zaporizhzhia, and he would want to come down hard on what the principles need to be, and the Russians tell him, ‘Look, back off,’ and he would take into consideration that they would have veto power over his becoming secretary-general,” the ex-UN official said.
“I think that’s what the resolution and the joint letter would seek to avoid, because you can imagine that if he turned the work of the IAEA over to an acting director-general, that person might be able to stand up more firmly up to any pressure created by the Russian Federation. That is the kind of speculative concern that led to this provision.”
Zaporizhzia, the biggest nuclear plant in Europe, has been under Russian military control since March 2022, shortly after Moscow led its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its six reactors have been shut down since, but the plant needs power to maintain cooling and safety systems. Kyiv has accused Russia of disrupting this power supply with its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.
The former UN person said that the “smart” way for Grossi to proceed in his race — which is more of a selection process — would be to step down in the coming weeks or months. “If he goes right to the end as IAEA director-general, that will be a tactical mistake. He could announce that, ‘In due course I do intend to suspend, right now I have some important work that I need to achieve.’ That would be a PR way to handle this.”
The source raised another apparent flaw in the campaign process, which is that a candidate’s funding disclosure must be made at the time of nomination, with no requirement for further updates. “It means they could report funding from very respectable sources, and then the day after their nomination they could get all kinds of funding, including from sources that may not be so benign. Reporting should be ongoing throughout the campaign,” the source said.
Grossi’s financial disclosure reads in full: “Activities related to the selection process will be financed by the candidate, with his own financial resources.”
“Face time” with US
Ezequiel Jiménez Martínez, a senior fellow at the Center for International Law Research and Policy, said there was no question that Grossi should take a leave of absence while campaigning.
“But he’s not going to do it, right. His position of head of agency in this context is going to give him face time with [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio and others, who are instrumental in the Security Council. He is one of the few head of agencies who has had closed-door meetings with Rubio; that doesn’t happen, and he has had a few by now.”
Jiménez said Grossi’s ambition to be the next UN boss made it impossible for him to continue as a neutral head of the IAEA. “He will probably pursue policy aims within the agency that are, at the least, not going to make the US angry. Of course, Iran is an easy one, but Ukraine is not so easy.”
Grossi, he added, had probably started planning his shot at the top UN post early in 2024, soon after Milei came to office as Argentina’s president.
“We’re talking about the Milei government, so they are going to play an agenda, the cultural war. We should elect a woman, but of course they are going to go for a man, a white man,” he said. “That’s part of their narrative, right, go against the wokeness of the UN.”
Jiménez said the Milei administration, in backing Grossi, was abandoning such principles as equality and justice. “They’re looking at ‘How can we disrupt the system in a way that we keep front and center of the news,’ and of course for the US this is a win-win as well.”
Few commentators would argue that Grossi is not an accomplished diplomat and agency head.
“I think he will be a reformist [as UNSG], he will cut the budget, he will exit staff, he will close regional offices, he will merge agencies, a lot of the things Guterres is already doing, Grossi will see them to completion,” Jiménez said.
Daws said that Grossi has been “quite a neutral, steady, international civil servant. There is a clear public record of how he has performed in the IAEA, and that’s been as an engaged multilateralist who has reasonably successfully navigated the current geopolitical tensions and changing international dynamics.”
But Daws stressed that he personally favored a woman to succeed Guterres. Gender is a leading factor counting against Grossi. All nine secretaries-general so far have been men, and both General Assembly Resolution 79/327 and the Nov. 25 joint letter explicitly encouraged members to nominate women candidates.
Asked about this by Al Jazeera late last year, Grossi said the main criterion should be merit, not gender.
Krasno is not impressed with this attitude, which she called annoying and frustrating.
“I’ve run into that so many times, when I say I’m supporting a woman. They say, ‘Well, it has to be on merit.’ Now would you ever say that with the normal process of nominating men? You would never say that, because of course it’s on merit, of course. It’s demeaning women, as if they would be elected, but not on merit,” she said.
“There are women who are prime ministers, presidents, foreign ministers, defense ministers, the president of the EU Commission,” she added. “It goes on and on. There are many, many extremely qualified women.”
At a media briefing on March 13, Baerbock of the General Assembly was asked if she had spoken to Grossi about stepping down. She did not answer directly but noted that the selection process required all candidates to take part in interactive dialogues, which begin on April 20.
Anton Ferreira worked for 23 years as a correspondent and desk editor at Reuters. He started in Hong Kong and later worked long-term assignments in the Mideast, Latin America, New York City, Washington and South Africa. Ferreira is now based in South Africa.
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The IAEA is not a UN agency; it is independent and has its own charter. UN member states can appoint their own representatives to the IAEA, which may sound normal. However, what you may not know is that if every member state does not appoint a representative, and there is not one official member from a state, the IAEA still runs perfectly without them. So, who is really running the IAEA? ask The Pope
Quite right, Peter, though the IAEA IS part of “the UN system” referred to in the resolution and joint letter.
It’s a good article on an important topic by an excellent writer, but the final editing by PassBlue has been a bit disingenuous. I didn’t actively question whether the GA guidance applied to Grossi. I rather responded to a question about whether it definitely did. While on the balance of probabilities it still applies to him, there remains a question mark over that. And it’s a moot procedural point anyway as Grossi has said he considered it as required. As highlighted in the article I have been a strong and vocal advocate for over two decades now for the next UN Secretary-General to be a woman. But those organisations who also support that should seek to remain objective and professional when analysing all candidates.
We never intend for our editing to be “disingenuous.” Mistakes can be made in the editing process, but it is never meant to be intentional.