Luis Ayllón
The Council of Ministers will soon appoint the diplomat Fernando Fernández-Arias as the new Director General of the United Nations, International Organizations and Human Rights, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sources told The Diplomat.
Fernando Fernández-Arias will fill the vacancy left by Marcos Gómez, who was recently appointed Spanish Ambassador to Colombia.
Fernández-Arias is currently the ambassador-director of the Diplomatic School, a post in which he has been very active since he took up his post in September 2018. The School will be temporarily headed by the Deputy Director, María Palacios.
Fernando Fernández-Arias has been a diplomat since 1990. Much of his career has been related to the UN, since its beginnings, as he was head of area in the sub-directorate general of the United Nations in the Ministry. Subsequently, between 2010 and 2015 he was assigned to the Spanish Mission to the UN in New York. There he coordinated the campaign to elect our country as a non-permanent member of the Security Council, which became a reality in the period 2015-2016. He later served as political coordinator in that body.
In 2016-17 he conducted research at Harvard University on the role of the UN Security Council in the promotion and protection of human rights.
Fernández-Arias is also an expert in the field of human rights, a subject on which he has several publications, in addition to having been deputy director general of the Office of Human Rights in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 2005 and 2008 and a member of the advisory board of the Subdirectorate General of Migration Affairs in 2015.
He was also posted at the Spanish Embassy in Jordan and at the Consulates in Jerusalem and London, and held the second position at the Embassy in Finland. In 2009 he participated in Washington in the Transatlantic Diplomatic Fellow program of the U.S. Department of State.
He was also Director of the Office of International Relations at the Ministry of Equality from 2007 to 2008 and in 2008 and 2009 he was Vice President of the European Union Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men.
In November 2017 he was appointed Director of Programming at Casa América until his appointment as Director of the Diplomatic School.
