bbc
AFP
The UN's new secretary general has been selected - and they are not, contrary to calls from politicians around the world, a woman, or from eastern Europe.
Instead, it is Antonio Guterres, a man from western Europe, who is following in Ban Ki-Moon's footsteps.
Speaking earlier this year, Richard Gowan, a UN expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said insiders believed Mr Guterres "could give the UN the kind of kick up the backside it needs".
But it is fair to say, outside Portugal and international politics, little is known about the man set to become the world's diplomat-in-chief from January next year.
Mr Guterres was born in Lisbon in 1949. He studied engineering and physics at the Instituto Superior Técnico, before going into academia after graduating in 1971.
But academia only held the fervent Catholic's interest for a couple of years. He joined the Socialist party in 1974 - the same year five decades of dictatorship came to an end in Portugal - and soon became a full-time politician.
In 1995 - three years after being elected the Socialist party's secretary general - he was voted in as prime minister, a position he held until 2002.
Then Mr Guterres, fluent in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French, turned his attention to the world of international diplomacy, becoming the UN's high commissioner for refugees in 2005.
Under his guidance, the numbers working in the agency's Geneva head office were slashed, while its capacity to respond to international crises by deploying more staff closer to hotspots was improved.
However, it was his tireless attempts to get the world's richest countries to do more for those fleeing conflict and disaster around the world that people remember.
"We can't deter people fleeing for their lives," he wrote in Time magazine last year. "They will come. The choice we have is how well we manage their arrival, and how humanely."
Mr Guterres, 67, has two children from his marriage to his first wife, who died in 1998. He remarried in 2001.
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