Staff
The chief executive of the Secretariat, and of the Commonwealth as a whole, is the Commonwealth Secretary-General. All Secretariat staff report to the secretary-general, who is also responsible for spending the Secretariat's budget, which is granted by the Heads of Government. It is the secretary-general, and not the ceremonial Head of the Commonwealth, that represents the Commonwealth publicly. The secretary-general is elected by the Heads of Government at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings for terms of four years; previously, until 2000, a term was five years. The current secretary-general India's Kamalesh Sharma, who replaced Don McKinnon as secretary-general on 1 April 2008.
The secretary-general is assisted by two deputy secretaries-general: one responsible for economic affairs (currently Ransford Smith of Jamaica) and one for political affairs (Mmasekgoa Masire-Mwamba of Botswana). He is also assisted by an assistant secretary-general for corporate affairs Stephen Cutts. There are ten directors from the Commonwealth Secretariat. The secretary-general may appoint junior staff at his own discretion, provided the Secretariat can afford it, whilst the more senior staff may be appointed only from a shortlist of nominations from the Heads of Government. In practice, the secretary-general has more power than this; member governments consult the secretary-general on nominations, and the secretary-general has also at times submitted nominations of his own.
All members of staff are exempt from income tax, under the International Organisations Act 2005, which redefined the legal status of the Secretariat.
Read more about this topic: Commonwealth Secretariat
Famous quotes containing the word staff:
“In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“I shall not want false witness to condemn me,
Nor store of treasons to augment my guilt.
The ancient proverb will be well effected:
“A staff is quickly found to beat a dog.””
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)