UN diplomats: Portugal's Guterres tops poll for UN chief

The 15 Security Council members decided not to reveal the results of their voting to encourage, ''discourage, or express no opinion about the 11 candidates — unlike the informal straw polls 10 years ago, which were made public and led to Ban's election to the world's top diplomatic post.

According to the U.N. Charter, the secretary-general is chosen by the 193-member General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council.

In the first round of voting, Guterres, who was Portugal's center-left Socialist prime minister from 1995-2002 and served as U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees until the end of last year, received 12 "encourage" votes and three "no opinion" votes.

Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica, the U.N. official who played a key role in shaping last December's historic agreement to fight climate change, was in eighth place followed by former Moldovan Foreign Minister Natalia Gherman, Slovakia's Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak, and Montenegro's Foreign Minister Igor Luksic, they said.