PARIS: France and Qatar were running neck-and-neck in the race to lead the UN’s troubled cultural body after a third round of voting Wednesday whittled the field down to five.
Qatar’s Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al-Kawari and France’s Audrey Azoulay — both former culture ministers — had 18 votes apiece in the battle to replace outgoing UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova.
Behind them in the secret ballot was Egyptian career diplomat Moushira Khattab with 13 votes and China’s Tang Qian with five, according to results posted on UNESCO’s website.
Vera El Khoury of Lebanon came last on four votes.
Thirty votes are needed to clinch the nomination to head the Paris-based UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The body’s 58 board members have been gathered in the French capital since Friday selecting a candidate.
The winner must be approved by UNESCO’s 195 member states in November, though this is seen as a formality.
Vietnam’s Pham Sanh Chau dropped out of the race Wednesday, having scored five votes in the second round. Candidates from Guatemala, Iraq and Azerbaijan have also given up.
If no candidate wins an outright majority after Thursday’s fourth round, it goes to a run-off between the top two.
Most of the candidates acknowledge the need to reform the 71-year-old organization whose bloated bureaucracy is accused of inefficiency.
UNESCO has been accused of bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it infuriated Israel and staunch ally the United States by granting full membership to Palestine in 2011.
Both countries suspended their funding to the agency — best-known for its prestigious World Heritage List — over the move.
Arab countries have complained that UNESCO has never had a boss from their region.
However, UNESCO does not observe the kind of rotation by world region which is used when choosing a UN secretary general.
France, Qatar neck-and-neck for UNESCO chief
France, Qatar neck-and-neck for UNESCO chief
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
