Former UN president Eliasson on peace, development, and human rights

Jan Eliasson will take as his point of departure the UN declaration from 2005 that its work must be based on the three pillars of peace, development, and human rights. He will point out their mutual dependency and also speak about Dag Hammarskjöld’s interest in nature and culture as a foundation for diplomacy. Crown Princess Victoria will attend the lecture.

Jan Eliasson started working at the Foreign Ministryr (FM) in 1965 with assignments in Paris, Bonn, and Washington, among other places. In 1982–83 he was foreign policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office and in 1983–87 head of the political department at the FM. 1980-86 Eliasson also served as Olof Palme’s adviser in the UN mediation assignment in the Iran-Iraq War and in 1988-1992 was Sweden’s UN ambassador in New York. He then became Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations and head of the newly established Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), where he worked to increase assistance to Somalia, among other things. From 1994 to 2000 he was state secretary for foreign affairs at the FM and from 2000 to 2005 Swedish ambassador to the US. In 2005 he was elected president of the UN General Assembly for a term running through September 11, 2006, an assignment he left when he was appointed foreign minister of Sweden in 2006. However, his period as foreign minister was cut short by
the Social Democratic Party’s election loss in September 2006. His greatest accomplishment as foreign minister was the evacuation of Swedes from Lebanon during the conflict with Israel in the summer of 2006.

As of January 2006, Eliasson also holds an honorary doctorate from the Uppsala University Faculty of Social Sciences, where he has also been a guest professor three times.

In December 2006 Eliasson was appointed by Kofi Annan to be the UN special emissary in Darfur in Sudan, an assignment he retired from in 2008. He also serves as chairman of the Anna Lindh Memorial Fund and WaterAid/Sweden.

The Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture has been an annual event since 1998 and is given in memory of Dag Hammarskjöld, the second secretary general of the UN, and the values he stood for in his work: involvement, humanism, and international solidarity and cooperation. The purpose is, in the spirit of Dag Hammarskjöld, to emphasize and secure the value of international cooperation and solidarity and to inspire those working in these areas as well as new interested groups, especially the coming generation.

The lecture, which is open to the public, will be followed by a question and answer period and a performance by the choir Allmänna Sången.

Time and place: Grand Auditorium, September 18, 4.00 p.m.

Jan Eliasson will also take part in a ceremony at Dag Hammarskjöld’s grave in the old cemetery in Uppsala at 3:30 p.m.

Read more about Jan Eliasson on the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation Website http://www.dhf.uu.se  where a video of his lecture will be posted afterward.