José Ayala Lasso

José Ayala Lasso (born January 29, 1932 in Quito ) is an Ecuadorian lawyer , diplomat and retired politician . He was the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1994 to 1997 .

From 1977 to 1979 he was Foreign Minister of Ecuador and Ambassador to France , Belgium , Luxembourg , the EC , the Vatican and Peru . From 1997 to 2000 he was again Foreign Minister of Ecuador and led urgent border negotiations with Peru to prevent war. In 1998 a border treaty was signed between Ecuador and Peru.

As the High Commissioner for Human Rights, he first had to set priorities and establish the credibility of his office. Shortly after he took office on April 5, 1994, the genocide began in Rwanda . He traveled there several times and reported to the General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Commission.

He has expanded the activities of the UN Human Rights Center in order to not only discuss human rights in the conference rooms of the UN in Geneva, but also to bring them to man, all over the world. That is why he has opened 26 agencies in all regions of the world. He stood up for all victims of injustice and arbitrariness, especially victims of genocide and so-called ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Cambodia, Colombia and Yugoslavia. He did not forget the so-called politically "incorrect" victims. His greeting to the German expellees on May 28, 1995 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main ("50 years of expulsion") and his speech to the German expellees in Berlin on August 6, 2005 ("60 years of expulsion"), in the presence of Chancellor candidate Angela Merkel and Interior Minister Otto Schily attracted media and academic attention. A major conference on displacement and international law was held in Geneva in March 1997 under his leadership. This resulted in the report by Special Rapporteur Awn Shawkat Al Khasawneh “The Human Rights Dimensions of Population Transfers” (UN Doc. E / CN.4 / Sub.2 / 1997/23).

literature

• José Ayala Lasso: Defining the Mandate. In: Harvard International Review , Winter 1994/95, pp. 38-78.
• José Ayala Lasso: Making Human Rights a Reality in the Twenty-first Century. In: Emory International Law Review , 10 : 497-508 (1996).
• Alfred de Zayas : Human Rights, Center for Human Rights / High Commissioner for Human Rights. In: Helmut Volger (Ed.): Lexicon of the United Nations. Oldenbourg, 2000, pp. 337-343.

Web links

• Short biography (2004) ( Memento from August 14, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
• Excerpts from the address on Homeland Day, Berlin, on August 6, 2005 , accessed on July 21, 2015
• Greeting on May 28, 1995 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt , accessed on July 21, 2015

Footnotes