Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi appointed IAEA chief

Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi was on Tuesday appointed to succeed late Yukiya Amano as the new director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a United Nations' nuclear watchdog.

He will be appointed for a term of four years and assume office no later than January 1, 2020. The 58-year-old will be the sixth head of the IAEA since it was founded more than six decades ago.

Grossi is a nuclear and diplomatic veteran from Buenos Aires in Argentina.

He graduated from the Argentine Foreign Ministry's National Foreign Service Institute and the University of Geneva in 1985.

He served as a diplomat for a decade before holding several senior positions within the United Nations. He chaired expert panels on the UN Register of Conventional Arms in 1997 and 2000.

He headed the IAEA headquarters in the Austrian capital of Vienna and the UN's Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague in the Netherlands from 2002 to 2007.

He was the chief political coordinator at the Argentine Foreign Ministry from 2007 to 2010, before being named an ambassador to Belgium, while doubling as Argentine envoy to the UN office in Geneva.

The IAEA had appointed Grossi as its assistant director-general in 2010 for a stint of three years.

He has been Argentina's ambassador to Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia and the permanent representative to international organisations in Vienna since 2013.

He headed the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which is a multinational export control regime, the Convention on Nuclear Security and was deputy to the head of the OPCW between 2014 and 2016.

Gossi will preside over the 2020 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons at the UN headquarter in New York from April to May.