Background

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born on November 14, 1922, to the Egyptian Coptic familiy. His father, Yusuf, was country's finance minister, while a grandfather had been prime-minister of Egypt since 1908 until his assassination in 1910.

Education

After completing a law degree in 1946 at Cairo University, Boutros Boutros-Ghali spent the next four years in France, earning diplomas in higher studies in public law and in economics at the Paris School of International Affairs, as well as a Ph. D. in international law from Paris University in 1949.

Career

After graduation in 1949, Boutros-Ghali took the position of a professor of international law and international relations at Cairo University at which he officially remained until 1977. During these years he also acted as a Fulbright Research Scholar at Columbia University in 1954-1955 and as a Director of the Centre of Research at the Hague Academy of International Law in 1963-1964. At the same time he was actively publishing the results of his research that included over 100 articles on foreign policy problems and at least 12 books, doing it parallelly with taking part in plenty of international conferences and conducting guest lectures at famous universities all over the world from Princeton to the Warsaw Institute of International Relations and Nairobi University.

Being a member of United Nations International Law Commission in 1979-1991 Boutros-Ghali managed to create a vision of how this legal body works which was of great help for him in his future work. Boutros-Ghali left academia in October 1977, with what proved to be an exquisite sense of timing. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made Boutros-Ghali his acting foreign minister during Sadat’s 1977 visit to Jerusalem, and in 1979 Boutros-Ghali assisted Sadat during Egypt’s negotiations with Israel during formation of the Camp David Accords.

After the Camp David achievements, Boutros-Ghali continued to rise in rank within the Egyptian government. By 1991 he had gained enough respect in the sphere of international politics to be considered for the United Nations’ top office. In November of 1991, Boutros-Ghali ran for the position of United Nations Secretary-General and won easily. During his tenure as head of the United Nations, Boutros-Ghali walked a tightrope between competing for international powers.

After becoming a Secretary-General in 1992 Boutros Boutros-Ghali started acting as a leading advocate for post-Cold War internationalism. One of his key goals also was a certain level of reorganization within the United Nations itself. The tasks risen by him included: better coordination between New York and Geneva headquarters, budgetary resources spending optimization in order to increase number and complexity of the missions undertaken around the globe, pressing the issue of redefining the United Nations' mandate, and strengthening the commitment of each of the more than 180 member-states to the world body. The highest priority assigned by Boutros-Ghali was to broaden the role of peacekeeping in order to reassure its effectiveness.

This diverse program of reforms could not but make Boutros-Ghali a controversial figure in world affairs. He was involved in sharp political differences not only with the United States and other Western governments but also with UN military field commanders.

Boutros-Ghali has continued to remain committed to democratization throughout historically conflicted countries. He has overseen the deployment of over 70, 000 United Nations peacekeeping troops during his years in office. Boutros-Ghali remained a prominent and outspoken member of the United Nations until the end of his term in 1996.

From 1997 to 2002, Boutros-Ghali was Secretary-General of La Francophonie, an organisation of French-speaking nations. From 2003 to 2006, he served as the chairman of the board of the South Centre,[15] an intergovernmental research organisation of developing countries. Boutros-Ghali played a "significant role" in creating Egypt's National Council for Human Rights, and served as its president until 2012.

Boutros-Ghali supported the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly and was one of the initial signatories of the Campaign's appeal in 2007. In a message to the Campaign, he stressed the necessity to establish democratic participation of citizens at the global level. From 2009-2015 he also participated as jury member for the Conflict Prevention Prize, awarded every year by the Fondation Chirac.

Boutros-Ghali died aged 93 in a hospital in Cairo, after having been admitted for a broken pelvis or leg, on 16 February 2016.

Achievements

• 

  Perhaps Boutros-Ghali’s biggest achievement was unfortunately largely unheralded. It was his document “Agenda for Peace.” It initiated a plan for the United Nations to start examining social-economic dimensions of development in a more integrated way, especially in the aftermath of conflict.
  
  Before, the realms of social and economic development were largely viewed separately in the work of the organization. Boutros-Ghali termed the concept “post-conflict peace-building,” which entailed new ways to view post-conflict scenarios. These new lenses paved the way for strengthening an agenda known as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Unvanquished: A U.S. - U.N. Saga

    (For years the United States has treated the United Nation...)

    1999
  • The Papers of United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali

    (Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s term as U.N. secretary-general wa...)

    2003
  • Emanciper la francophonie 2002
  • Démocratiser la mondialisation 2002
  • Egypt's Road to Jerusalem 1998
  • Contribution à une théorie générale des alliances 1963
  • Mes annees a la maison de verre 1999
  • Le chemin de Jérusalem 1997
  • Agenda for Peace 1995 1995
  • An agenda for democratization 1996

Religion

Boutros-Ghali's family was traditionally Coptic Orthodox and he stuck to it. A military funeral was held for him with prayers led by Coptic Pope Tawadros II. He is buried at Petrine Church in Abbassia, Cairo.

Politics

Boutros-Ghali was a member of the Central Committee of the Arab Socialist Union from 1974 to 1977. From 1978 to 2011 he was a member of National Democratic party. From 2011 to 2016 - Independent.

Boutros-Ghali used his position to summon all countries and governments belatedly to fulfill the original 1945 United Nations Charter pledge of an integrated global system and, accordingly, championed the United Nations organization and its affiliate specialized agencies in promoting the cause of international peace and common security, economic development, and human rights through multilateral cooperation.

Views

Boutros-Ghali considered himself to be an intellectual in politics. For many UN staff he was aloof and he would concede a paternalistic tone as a result of many years of teaching. His view, expressed to the New York Times, that a bureaucracy was best run by stealth and sudden violence did not endear him to his colleagues. In his memoir, a book published in 1999 and entitled Unvanquished: A US-UN Saga, all decision-making is quite clearly his own. In an extraordinarily angry book, Boutros-Ghali blamed all UN failures on the Clinton administration.

Quotations: "The lesson I learnt in Cairo still applies. The only way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence."

"Education itself - which can and should play an important role in the apprenticeship of tolerance and respect for other people - sometimes encourages identitarian closure or even extremist behaviour."

"It is therefore vital to ensure that education does not encourage rejection of other people or identitarian closure, but that on the contrary it encourages knowledge and respect for other cultures, other religions and other ways of being and living."

"The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council."

"I am Boutros Boutros-Ghali; put down your gun and listen to Bob Marley."

Membership

As a prominent political figure, Boutros-Ghali was granted several honorary memberships in a number of worlds Academies.

• Academy of Sciences of Belarus , Belarus

• Russian Academy of Natural Sciences , Russian Federation

• Russian Academy of Sciences , Russian Federation

• Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques , France

Personality

Boutros Boutros-Ghali is remembered as a powerful, charismatic, and controversial voice.

Quotes from others about the person

• Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:
  
  “Perhaps he was too direct for some; he might have been too professorial for others; some definitely found him too independent - a goal that he considered among the highest virtues for any Secretary-General of the United Nations.”
  
  “No one could deny his commitment to our Organization. Throughout his service, he never relented in defending the United Nations and our Charter. As he said at the outset of his term, ‘With all the convulsions in global society, only one power is left that can impose order on incipient chaos: it is the power of principles transcending changing perceptions of expediency.’”

Interests

• collecting old pens from the Ottoman Empire

• Artists

  Henri Matisse

Connections

Boutros Boutros-Ghali's wife, Leia Maria Boutros-Ghali, née Leia Nadler, was raised in an Egyptian Jewish family in Alexandria and converted to Roman Catholicism as a young woman.

Father:

Yusuf Butros-Ghali

Mother:

Safela Mikhail Sharubim

Wife:

Leia Nadler

Grandfather:

Boutros Ghali

Prime Minister of Egypt from 1908

Grandfather:

Mikhail Sharubim (1861–1920)

colleague:

Anwar Sadat

colleague:

Hosni Mubarak

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998