Introducing the 2012 Commencement Speaker – Dr. Bernard Kouchner

Bernard Kouchner has mobilized international responses to some of the world’s most challenging human rights crises. He has led these these efforts both from inside government, where he served at the ministerial level for 18 years, and from the outside through the powerful global civil society organizations that he has created. He is a passionate, principled, outspoken, and sometimes controversial advocate of the world’s responsibility to protect the victims of humanitarian catastrophes.

A physician by training, Dr. Kouchner served three times as the French Minister of Health and Humanitarian Affairs, and most recently, until November 2010, as the Minister of Foreign and European Affairs. According to opinion polls, he is still one of the most popular politicians in France.

Bernard Kouchner’s lifelong commitment to human rights began when he was serving as a young Red Cross doctor in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war. There he came to believe that to be effective a humanitarian organization could not always be neutral, and he challenged the traditional Red Cross stance of neutrality. In 1971 he co-founded Medecins Sans Frontieres with the mission of providing emergency medical care in the developing world, and the international doctors’ organization was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

In 1979, he chartered a cargo ship and took it to the South China Sea with a group of doctors to rescue Vietnamese boat people trying desperately to reach Hong Kong. A year later he founded Doctors of the World, with a more activist mission of mobilizing interventionist responses to humanitarian crises.

Dr. Kouchner has organized humanitarian operations throughout the world – in Somalia, El Salvador, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Uruguay, Peru, Guatamala, Honduras, Bosnia and Kosovo. In Kosovo, he was appointed the first UN Special Representative following the international intervention of 1999.

As France’s Minister of Health and Humanitarian Affairs, he was an early advocate of the UN doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect -- a doctrine that commits the world to prevent or punish mass atrocities – and a doctrine that many say should be invoked today in Syria., as Dr. Kouchner wrote in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune.

1 TIME Magazine named Bernard Kouchner one of the world’s top 100 heroes in 2004. It had this to say about him:

“He breaks taboos and reveals matters that render us sleepless. Faced with globalized inhumanity burning the 21st century, he is introducing a new humanism without geographical or political borders. He does it not to open the gates of paradise, but to bolt the gates of hell.”

Please join me in welcoming Bernard Kouchner as our Commencement Speaker.

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