Felix Schnyder

Felix Schnyder (born March 5, 1910 in Burgdorf ; † November 8, 1992 in Zurich ) was a Swiss lawyer , diplomat and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees .

Life

The son of the engineer Max Schnyder and twin brother of the Swiss film director Franz Schnyder studied law , was admitted to the bar and worked in Swiss private industry. In 1940 he joined the Swiss diplomatic service and worked for the Federal Political Department as attaché and second and first class legation secretary. In 1947 he became the first employee and later as the Legation Councilor ad interim of the Federal Legation in Moscow .

At the beginning of 1949 he returned to Bern and in the same year he succeeded François de Diesbach as head of the Swiss delegation in Berlin . In the following years Schnyder was First Counselor at the Swiss Legation in Washington, DC , envoy to Israel and from 1958 a permanent Swiss observer at the United Nations . Schnyder was appointed to the Executive Committee of UNICEF and was its chairman in 1960. From 1960 to 1965 he was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Act

As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Schnyder was responsible, among other things, for the repatriation of Algerian refugees from Tunisia and Morocco , the first of numerous large UNHCR return and reintegration projects. He also secured the support of the General Assembly for the increasing use of the good offices of the UNHCR as intermediary between governments in global refugee crises, especially among refugees from Rwanda in the Great Lakes region . He helped expand UNHCR activities in Africa and in international recognition of the global nature of the refugee problem, where he played an important role in the initiation process that led to the ratification of the 1967 Protocol.

literature

• Felix Schnyder , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 18/1966 from April 25, 1966, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

• UNHCR Félix Schnyder (Switzerland) 1960–65
• UNHCR inauguration of a housing project for Hungarian refugees by Felix Schnyder in 1964
• UNICEF Executive Board since 1946
• Marc Perrenoud: Schnyder, Felix. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Schnyder, Felix in the Dodis databaseof diplomatic documents in Switzerland
• Felix Schnyder in the archive database of the Swiss Federal Archives

predecessor	Office	successor
Fritz Hegg	Swiss envoy in Tel Aviv 1957–1958	Emil Bisang
Agostino Soldati	Permanent observer for Switzerland at the United Nations in New York 1958–1961	Ernesto Thalmann
Alfred Zehnder	Swiss Ambassador to Washington, DC 1966–1975	Raymond Probst