Bertrand Ramcharan

Bertrand Ramcharan "is the first recipient of the Goodman United Nations Fellowship at the Kennedy School of Government and will be a part of the Carr Center for the 2004 fall semester. From May 2003 until July 2004 Ramcharan served as United Nations Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights. Prior to that appointment, which he left at the level of Under-Secretary-General, he was Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights and Assistant Secretary-General. He is an international expert and leader on international law and practice of human rights. A Barrister of Lincoln's Inn, with a Doctorate in international law from the London School of Economics and Political Science, he has been a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists and also a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. He has taught as Adjunct Professor of International Human Rights Law at Columbia University and has written or edited some twenty books and numerous articles. He is the holder of the prestigious Diploma in International Law of the Hague Academy of International Law, where he has also been Director of Studies. During his diverse career of three decades at the United Nations he has served in the Centre for Human Rights as Special Assistant to the Director, as the Secretary-General's Chief Speech-Writer (in which capacity he wrote the first Secretariat draft of Agenda for Peace), as Director of the Office of the SRSG in UNPROFOR, the largest-ever United Nations peacekeeping operation, as Director of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia and Political Adviser to the peace negotiators in the Yugoslav conflict for four years, and as a Director in the UN Political Department, dealing with African conflicts. He has been on a number of fact-finding and diplomatic missions for the United Nations, more recently to look at human rights issues in the conflict in Cote d'Ivoire, to Central Asia and Rwanda. Previously he has visited prisoner of war camps in Iran and Iraq, participated in a preventive diplomacy mission to Bulgaria and Turkey in the 1990s, and coordinated a high level panel of eminent persons to Algeria in 1998, at the height of the violence in that country.“

"Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan was Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights and Assistant Secretary-General when Mr. Sergio Vieira de Mello, then High Commissioner, was killed on 19 August 2003 during the attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Dr. Ramcharan then assumed the post of acting High Commissioner for Human Rights, which he held until July 2004, when a new High Commissioner, was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General.

"During his three decades with the United Nations, Dr. Ramcharan served in the Centre for Human Rights as Special Assistant to the Director, as the Secretary-General's Chief Speechwriter, as Director of the Office of the Special Representative for the Secretary-General in UNPROFOR, the largest-ever United Nations peacekeeping operation, as Director of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, as political adviser to the peace negotiators in the Yugoslav conflict, and as a Director in the United Nations Political Department, focusing on conflicts in Africa.

"A barrister of Lincoln 's Inn, with a Doctorate in international law from the London School of Economics and Political Science earned in 1973, Dr. Ramcharan was a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists from 1991 to 1998 and has been a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration since 1996. He was Adjunct Professor of International Human Rights Law at Columbia University and has written or edited some twenty books and numerous articles."


 * Carr Center, Former Fellows 2004/05