Background
Pfirter was born in Santa Fe, Argentina, on 25 August 1948.
Pfirter was born in Santa Fe, Argentina, on 25 August 1948.
He graduated as a lawyer from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina).
He was the Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) from 2002 to 2010. During his diplomatic career, Pfirter held various positions at the Argentine Foreign Ministry. In 1992 he was promoted to the rank of Ambassador and in the same year he became the Director of the Argentine-Brazilian Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) and the Director of the Argentine Space Agency (CONAE).
He was subsequently appointed Undersecretary for Foreign Policy at the Argentine Master of Fine Arts. He was the Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from 1995 to 2000.
In 2002, Pfirter was unanimously elected the Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, The Netherlands. He was elected for a second term in 2006.
Pfirter’s tenure was praised as a time of consolidation and strengthening of the OPCW after the controversial departure of his predecessor José Bustani. Pfirter gathered support for chemical weapons destruction and as a manager he succeeded in administering the Secretariat with zero nominal growth (ZNG) for four years in a row.
After retiring in 2010, he became a member of the Global Council on Weapons of Mass Destruction at the World Economic Forum.