By Clothilde Goujard
Lithuanian diplomat Tomas Lamanauskas won the race to become the next deputy secretary general of the United Nations’ telecoms agency on Thursday, putting an EU official at the center of the work on global telecoms rules.
Lamanauskas won the backing of 105 countries. His opponents, Korean official Chaesub Lee and Samoa’s Gisa Purcell, won 59 and 12 votes respectively.
Lamanauskas, whose mandate is for four years, will work alongside the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)’s newly elected secretary general, American official Doreen Bogdan-Martin, to set standards for global telecoms and tech infrastructure and crucial new technology like 6G and artificial intelligence.
The victory for the Lithuanian marks a success for the European Union which has been striving to ramp up its international clout on internet governance to protect values such as democracy, privacy and online freedom and rights. The 27 EU countries all backed the Lithuanian candidacy, a first-ever show of EU unity in such a vote.
