Background and career
Ban Ki-moon (Korean: 반기문; born 13 June 1944) is a South Korean politician and diplomat who served as the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations between 2007 and 2016. Prior to his appointment as secretary-general, Ban was the South Korean minister of foreign affairs and trade between 2004 and 2006. Ban was initially considered to be a long shot for the office of Secretary-General of the United Nations; he began to campaign for the office in February 2006. As the foreign minister of South Korea, he was able to travel to all the countries on the United Nations Security Council, a manoeuvre that subsequently turned him into the campaign's front-runner. On 13 October 2006, Ban was elected as the eighth secretary-general by the United Nations General Assembly. On 1 January 2007, he succeeded Kofi Annan. Diplomatically, Ban has taken particularly strong views on global warming, pressing the issue repeatedly with U.S. president George W. Bush, and on the Darfur conflict, where he helped persuade Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir to allow peacekeeping troops to enter Sudan. António Guterres was appointed by the General Assembly on 13 October 2016 to be the successor of Ban Ki-moon as he exited on 31 December 2016. On 14 September 2017, Ban was elected chair of the International Olympic Committee's Ethics Commission. Also in 2017, Ban co-founded the nonprofit Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens. He also currently serves as the Distinguished Chair Professor at Yonsei University's Institute for Global Engagement and Empowerment.
On 20 February 2018, Ban was unanimously elected as the president of the Assembly and chair of the council of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI). Ban also served as co-chair of the Global Center on Adaptation from 2018 to 2026, which has taken forward the work of the Global Commission on Adaptation through its programmes. In March 2026, the organisation announced the conclusion of his tenure as founding chair and that he would assume the role of GCA Chair Emeritus. He became the first major international diplomat to back the Green New Deal, a nascent effort by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the United States to zero out planet-warming emissions and end poverty over the next decade.
Ban was born on 13 June 1944 in the small farming village of Haengchi, Wonnam Township (-myeon), in Insei, Chūseihoku Province, Korea, Empire of Japan (now North Chungcheong Province, South Korea). He is of the Gwangju Ban clan. His family then moved to the nearby town of Chungju, where he grew up. During Ban's childhood, his father had a warehouse business, but the warehouse went bankrupt and the family lost its middle-class standard of living. When Ban was six, his family fled to a remote mountainside for much of the Korean War. After the war ended, his family returned to Chungju. Ban has said that, during this time, he met American soldiers. During his secondary school education at Chungju High School, Ban was part of the local Scout movement while he also became a star student, particularly in his studies of the English language. In 1962, Ban won an essay contest sponsored by the Red Cross and earned a trip to the United States where he lived in San Francisco with a host family for several months. As part of the trip, Ban met U.S. President John F. Kennedy. When a journalist at the meeting asked Ban what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, "I want to become a diplomat." Ban graduated from Seoul National University in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in international relations. He subsequently went on to complete a Master of Public Administration degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1985. At Harvard, he studied under Joseph Nye, who remarked that Ban had "a rare combination of analytic clarity, humility and perseverance." In addition to his native Korean, Ban speaks English and French. According to a retired UN official, "one of Ban's biggest handicaps was his lack of fluency in English, which made it difficult for him to win over audiences in the US and elsewhere." There have also been questions, however, regarding the extent of his knowledge of French, one of the two working languages of the United Nations Secretariat.
After graduating from university, Ban received the top score on Korea's foreign service exam. He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1970 and worked his way up the career ladder during the years of the Yusin Constitution. Ban's first overseas posting was to New Delhi, India, where he served as vice consul and impressed many of his superiors in the foreign ministry with his competence. Ban reportedly accepted a posting to India rather than the United States, because in India he would be able to save more money to send to his family. In 1974 he received his first posting to the United Nations, as First Secretary of the South Permanent Observer Mission (South Korea became a full UN member-state on 17 September 1991). After Park Chung Hee's 1979 assassination, Ban assumed the post of director of the United Nations Division. In 1980, Ban became director of the United Nations' International Organizations and Treaties Bureau, headquartered in Seoul. He has been posted twice to the South Korean embassy to the U.S. in Washington, D. C. Between these two appointments, he served as Director-General for American Affairs in 1990–92. In 1992, he became Vice Chairman of the South-North Joint Nuclear Control Commission, following the adoption by South and North Korea of the Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. From 1993 to 1994 Ban was Korea's deputy ambassador to the United States. He was promoted to the position of deputy minister for policy planning and international organisations in 1995 and then appointed national security advisor to the president in 1996. Ban's lengthy career overseas has been credited with helping him avoid South Korea's unforgiving political environment. Ban was appointed ambassador to Austria and Slovenia in 1998, and a year later he was also elected as chairman of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO PrepCom). During the negotiations, in what Ban considers the biggest blunder of his career, he included in a public letter a positive statement about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, not long after the United States had decided to abandon the treaty. To avoid anger from the United States, Ban was fired by President Kim Dae-jung, who also issued a public apology for Ban's statement. Ban was unemployed for the only time in his career and was expecting to receive an assignment to work in a remote and unimportant embassy. In 2001, during the 56th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, South Korea held the rotating presidency, and to Ban's surprise, he was selected to be the chief of staff to general assembly president Han Seung-soo. In 2003, incoming president Roh Moo-hyun selected Ban as one of his foreign policy advisors.
In 2004, Ban replaced the resigning Yoon Young-kwan as foreign minister of South Korea under president Roh Moo-hyun. At the beginning of his term, Ban was faced with two major crises: in June 2004 Kim Sun-il, a South Korean working as an Arabic translator, was kidnapped and killed in Iraq by Islamic extremists; and in December 2004 dozens of Koreans died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Ban survived scrutiny from lawmakers and saw an upturn in his popularity when talks began with North Korea. Ban became actively involved in issues relating to North-South Korean relationships. In September 2005, as foreign minister, he played a leading role in the diplomatic efforts to adopt the Joint Statement on resolving the North Korean nuclear issue at the fourth round of the Six-party talks held in Beijing. As foreign minister, Ban oversaw the trade and aid policies of South Korea. This work put Ban in the position of signing trade deals and delivering foreign assistance to diplomats who would later be influential in his candidacy for secretary-general. For example, Ban became the first senior South Korean minister to travel to the Republic of the Congo since its independence in 1960.
In February 2006, Ban declared his candidacy to replace Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General at the end of 2006, becoming the first South Korean to run for the office. Though Ban was the first to announce a candidacy, he was not originally considered a serious contender. Over the next eight months, Ban made ministerial visits to each of the 15 countries with a seat on the Security Council. Of the seven candidates, he topped each of the four straw polls conducted by the United Nations Security Council: on 24 July, 14 September, 28 September, and 2 October. During the period in which these polls took place, Ban made major speeches to the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. To be confirmed, Ban needed not only to win the support of the diplomatic community, but also to be able to avoid a veto from any of the five permanent members of the council: People's Republic of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ban was popular in Washington for having pushed to send South Korean troops to Iraq, and had the support of the Bush administration as he pursued the position. But Ban also opposed several U.S. positions: he expressed his support for the International Criminal Court (ICC), and favoured an entirely non-confrontational approach to dealing with North Korea. Ban said during his campaign that he would like to visit North Korea in person to meet with Kim Jong Il directly. Ban was viewed as a stark contrast from Kofi Annan, who was considered charismatic, but perceived as a weak manager because of problems surrounding the UN's oil-for-food program in Iraq. Ban struggled to win the approval of France. His official biography states that he speaks both English and French, the two working languages of the UN Secretariat. However, he has repeatedly struggled to answer questions in French from journalists. Ban has repeatedly acknowledged his limitations at French, but assured French diplomats that he was devoted to continuing his study. At a press conference on 11 January 2007, Ban remarked, "My French perhaps could be improved, and I am continuing to work. I have taken French lessons over the last few months. I think that, even if my French isn't perfect, I will continue to study it." As the secretary-general election drew closer, there was rising criticism of the South Korean campaign on Ban's behalf. Specifically, his alleged practice of systematically visiting all member states of the Security Council in his role as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade to secure votes in his support by signing trade deals with European countries and pledging aid to developing countries was the focus of many news articles. According to The Washington Post, "rivals have privately grumbled that Republic of Korea, which has the world's 11th-largest economy, has wielded its economic might to generate support for his candidacy". Ban reportedly said that these insinuations were "groundless". In an interview on 17 September 2006 he stated: "As front-runner, I know that I can become a target of this very scrutinising process", and that he was "a man of integrity". In the final informal poll on 2 October, Ban received fourteen favourable votes and one abstention ("no opinion") from the fifteen members of the Security Council. The one abstention came from the Japanese delegation, who vehemently opposed the idea of a Korean taking the role of secretary-general. Due to the overwhelming support of Ban by the rest of the Security Council, Japan later voted in favour of Ban to avoid controversy. More importantly, Ban was the only one to escape a veto; each of the other candidates received at least one "no" vote from among the five permanent members. After the vote, Shashi Tharoor, who finished second, withdrew his candidacy and China's Permanent Representative to the UN told reporters that "it is quite clear from today's straw poll that Minister Ban Ki-moon is the candidate that the Security Council will recommend to the General Assembly". On 9 October, the Security Council formally chose Ban as its nominee. In the public vote, he was supported by all 15 members of the council. On 13 October, the 192-member General Assembly acclaimed Ban as secretary-general. Ban joked about his nomination at a December gala for UN correspondents. He invoked the film Casino Royale, which was in theatres at time, stating "The name is Ban. Not James Ban. But I am coming in '07." as well as hesitatingly singing a modified rendition of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town; "I'm making a list, I'm checking it twice, I'm going to find out who's naughty or nice. Ban Ki-moon is coming to town!".
