Paul Ruegger

Paul Ruegger

Paul Ruegger (born August 14, 1897 in Lucerne ; † August 9, 1988 in Florence ) was a Swiss lawyer and diplomat . After several diplomatic posts, including in Italy during the fascist dictatorship of Mussolini , he was president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from 1948 to 1955 . In his later years he made a name for himself with his involvement in the UN in humanitarian law.

Life

Paul Ruegger was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, but spent his first school years in what was then Austria-Hungarian Slovenia with the children of Prince von Windisch-Grätz. Ruegger's father Dr. Julius Ruegger-Dresen worked there as a private tutor. The father then moved to the Lucerne Cantonal School as a mathematics teacher and rector, where Paul Ruegger graduated from the school in 1914. He then began to study law in Lausanne , which he completed after a stay in Munich with a dissertation in Zurich on the subject of private law terms in international law .

Ruegger began his professional career in 1918 in the League of Nations office of the Federal Political Department (EPD), where he became the first secretary of the legation until his resignation in 1925. In part-time he taught international law at the University of Geneva from 1922 to 1924 . From 1926 to 1928 he worked at the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague as deputy registrar Åke Hammarskjöld . After returning to the EPD, he worked in diplomatic posts in Bern , Paris and Rome . In Rome he was councilor of the legation. From June 1940 - Italy's entry into World War II - he was also responsible for representing the interests of 20 warring states vis-à-vis Italy. Soon he had differences with the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano and with Benito Mussolini himself. He was declared persona non grata and in 1942 he was relieved of his post. In 1944 he was appointed ambassador to London and had, among other things, the task of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Russia. When the League of Nations was dissolved in 1945/46, he was a member of the Swiss delegation and at the same time in the negotiating delegation that negotiated with the UN about the whereabouts and transfer of important international organizations to Geneva. From 1948 he also worked as an international lawyer in the UN bodies of the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

After serving as President of the ICRC, Ruegger headed several mediation campaigns, for example with a mandate from UN Secretary General Sithu U Thant during the Cuba crisis . In 1955 he was appointed to the Bureau International du Travail (BIT) in Geneva. From 1958 he was a member of the legal expert commission for the application of labor law conventions. He became increasingly involved in humanitarian law issues, for example in the Union de Secours Internationale (USI) and the Nansen Medal Committee . Furthermore, in the 1950s and 1960s, he headed several Swiss delegations to international legal conferences which, under the leadership of the UN, attempted to establish international law.

Ruegger was married twice. In his first marriage he married the Italian noblewoman Isabella Salzar (* 1898, † 1969) in 1932.

ICRC presidency

Ruegger worked for the then ICRC President Max Huber from March 1943 to May 1944 and was temporarily relieved of his work in the diplomatic service at his own request. On February 10, 1948, he took over the presidency of the ICRC . During his term of office, the current version of the Geneva Conventions came into force in 1949 and the statutes of the International Red Cross were revised. Extensive trips took him to the USA in 1948 , to the Soviet Union in 1950 and to China in 1951 .

On September 1, 1955, he was replaced by Léopold Boissier as President of the ICRC. He remained a member of the ICRC even after his retirement from this position until his death in 1988.

Works

• Paul Ruegger: The citizenship of legal persons - the principles of international law (= publication, Swiss Association for International Law , Volume 10: World War II Collection ) Orell Füssli, Zurich 1918, DNB 365058203 .

literature

• Stefan Glur: From the best horse in the stable to persona non grata. Paul Ruegger as Swiss envoy in Rome 1936–1942 (= Spirit and Work of the Times , Volume 100), Peter Lang, Bern 2005, ISBN 3-03-910623-6 (also dissertation University of Zurich 2004).

Web links

• Documents by and about Ruegger, Paul in the Dodis database of Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland
• Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement History - Paul Ruegger (Engl.)
• Estate at the Archives for Contemporary History (PDF)