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NEW OAS SECRETARY GENERAL ANNOUNCES RESTRUCTURING

Former Costa Rican President Miguel Angel Rodríguez took office today as Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) and announced a restructuring of the Organization to reflect in a more efficient way the priorities of the member states and to address its financial constraints.

Rodríguez underscored the need to focus the work of the General Secretariat on priority challenges to meet “the highest ideals of peace, justice, freedom and prosperity for the Americas.”

“In order to achieve those ideals we will work especially hard in the areas of human rights, democracy and conflict resolution, integral development and the fight against poverty, as well as the multidimensional aspects of security for all the people of our Hemisphere,” he said.

Under the new organizational structure, the OAS General Secretariat will have seven major operational areas, four of which will oversee the Organization’s substantive priority topics: human rights, democratic and political affairs, integral development and multidimensional security. The other three provide administrative and financial support, communications and outreach, and legal services.

The Secretary General said the streamlined structure, which reduces the number of directorships, will result in “considerable and necessary savings” of over $2 million per year for the OAS General Secretariat, which faces a budgetary shortfall of nearly $1 million in the current budgetary year and some $5 million next year.

The new structure consolidates certain departments and areas. For example, the human rights area coordinator will provide administrative and political support to the secretariats of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, as well as the Inter-American Children’s Institute and the Inter-American Commission of Women. According to Rodríguez, the administrative change will have no effect on the independence of the inter-American human rights system.

In the areas of democratic and political affairs, integral development and multidimensional security, their directors will harmonize all the activities of the offices in each department. The seven Directors, together with the Secretary General and the Assistant Secretary General will work as a Cabinet to assure teamwork to achieve the Organization’s goals.

The Secretary General said the changes would take effect immediately and would help the General Secretariat carry out its short- and long-term mandates. “We all have a great responsibility to the peoples of this Hemisphere and we must not let them down,” he said.

Reference: E-148/04