Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Biography

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born in Cairo in 1922 into a prominent Coptic Christian family; his grandfather Boutros Ghali had been prime minister of Egypt. He graduated from Cairo University in 1946, earned a doctorate in international law in Paris and a diploma from Sciences Po in 1949, and from 1949 to 1979 taught international law and international relations at Cairo University, with visiting posts abroad.

Under Anwar Sadat he joined the central committee of the Arab Socialist Union and in 1977 became Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, also serving twice as acting foreign minister. He took part in the negotiations that produced the Camp David Accords and the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and remained minister of state until 1991, briefly becoming deputy foreign minister.

In 1991 the Security Council chose him as the first African Secretary-General of the United Nations, and he took office in January 1992. He set out his ideas for preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping in An Agenda for Peace, but his term was dominated by crises in Somalia, Rwanda, Angola and the former Yugoslavia, and he was criticised for the UN's failure to act during the Rwandan genocide. In 1996 the United States vetoed a second term that the other fourteen Council members supported, making him the only Secretary-General denied re-election.

He then served as the first Secretary-General of La Francophonie from 1997 to 2002, chaired the South Centre, and helped create Egypt's National Council for Human Rights, which he led until 2012. He died in Cairo in 2016.