Birthday Former ICRC President and top diplomat Jakob Kellenberger turns 80

Jakob Kellenberger, former ICRC President and chief negotiator for the Bilateral Agreements I, celebrates his 80th birthday on October 19. It is outrageous and shocking that international humanitarian law is being observed less and less, he explains.

Jakob Kellenberger was born in 1944 in the former hospital in Heiden AR. Henry Dunant, initiator of the Red Cross, spent the last years of his life in the same building.

Kellenberger once described this circumstance as ironic. After all, as the later President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), he tirelessly stood up for Dunant's principle of protecting and helping the victims of war in numerous combat zones between 2000 and 2012.

Birthday in Spain

On October 19, Jakob Kellenberger will celebrate his 80th birthday with his wife in Salamanca, Spain, as he told the Keystone-SDA news agency. Every fall, he gives lectures in Spanish on international humanitarian law at the university there.

Against the backdrop of the current wars, Kellenberger said that this was being observed less and less, despite all the people who were committed to it. This is outrageous and shocking.

Straight talk with the powerful

As ICRC President, Kellenberger spoke impartially and without military protection with all warring parties and was regarded as a tireless and often uncomfortable campaigner for international humanitarian law. He negotiated with the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, and traveled to Sudan, southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Syria, among other places.

Kellenberger was known for speaking plainly with the powerful. "As long as the other person has the impression that you take their perspective seriously, you can be very tough," he explained in an interview.

He was also not afraid to rap the USA on the knuckles. Kellenberger criticized the bombing of civilians by the USA and the ICRC's lack of access to terror prisoners - especially in Iraq and in the Guantánamo camp in Cuba.

Chief negotiator for the Bilaterals I

Kellenberger studied French and Spanish literature in Zurich, Tours (F) and Granada (E). He learned his diplomatic skills at the Swiss Confederation.

In 1974, he embarked on a diplomatic career at the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and was appointed ambassador in 1988.

When Federal Councillor René Felber took over the FDFA in 1992, Kellenberger became State Secretary. From 1994 to 1998, he was chief negotiator for the bilateral negotiations with the EU.

Despite the usual resistance from certain political circles over the years, he is confident about the current negotiations between Switzerland and the EU, explained Kellenberger. He praised the current FDFA State Secretary Alexandre Fasel as "one of the most experienced and thorough experts on Swiss-EU history".

A bitter balance sheet

At his last annual media conference as President of the ICRC in Geneva in 2012, Kellenberger drew a bitter balance sheet with regard to the long-term conflicts that ran through his entire term of office: Afghanistan, Somalia, the Palestinian territories as well as Sudan and South Sudan showed that the "ability of politics to resolve conflicts is weak, especially when these conflicts have no strategic significance", he said.

"In wars, it is always the weakest who suffer, not those who caused them." However, he "loved" his work for the ICRC.