New York – Angola was on Friday elected one of the vice presidents of UN General Assembly during a meeting that served to elect Vuk Jeremi?, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, as President of its sixty-seventh session, voting by secret ballot for the first time in more than 20 years.

Thus, the Vice-Presidents for the sixty-seventh session will be  Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, China, Congo, France, Ghana, Honduras, Israel, Lebanon, Nepal, Netherlands, Palau, Peru, Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, Trinidad & Tobago, United Kingdom, the United States.

Mr. Jeremi? defeated Dalius ?ekuolis, Lithuanian Ambassador to the United Nations, by a vote of 99 to 85. 

The selection of the Assembly President traditionally follows the system of geographical rotation, with respective regional groups, in this case Eastern European States, putting forward a consensus candidate each year.

If a group cannot reach consensus on a single nominee, the door is open for a rare secret-ballot vote and the last time it occurred was in 1991, when the Group of Asian States nominated three candidates.