São Paulo — President of Iraq from 2018 to 2022, Barham Salih will take over the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR as of January 1. He was elected to a five-year term by the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Thursday (18). Salih will replace Italian Filippo Grandi, who has led the agency for the past 10 years.
In a statement released by UNHCR, Grandi welcomed the new High Commissioner, saying he has “decades” of high-level public service experience marked by consistent leadership and careful diplomacy. “His background and experience make him well prepared to lead UNHCR at a time of large-scale displacement and increasingly complex humanitarian and political challenges,” he said.
Grandi leaves the post after leading the agency through major displacement crises, including those in Syria, Sudan, and Ukraine. The UNHCR statement notes that the institution has faced cuts in humanitarian funding but still operates in 128 countries, with nearly 90% of its 14,600 staff working in field operations.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed Salih. In a statement, the Secretary-General’s office said that Salih played a key role in Iraq’s reconstruction starting in 2003.
In the Arab country, he also served as prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (2001–2004 and 2009–2012), as Iraq’s deputy prime minister from 2004 to 2009, and as minister of planning (2004–2006). He is currently a nonresident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School in the United States, and a nonresident leadership fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.
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Translated by Guilherme Miranda
