Tony de Brum

Tony de Brum (right) with British Foreign Office Secretary Hugo Swire 2013

Tony de Brum (also deBrum ; born February 26, 1945 in Tuvalu ; † August 22, 2017 in Majuro ) was a politician from the Marshall Islands . From March 2014 to January 2016 he was foreign minister of this small island nation in the Pacific.

De Brum spent his childhood, youth and adolescence in the Marshall Islands when they were under US administration and used as a nuclear test area. He studied at the University of Hawaii , where he was involved in a Marshallese - English dictionary published in 1976 .

After the USA granted self-government to the Marshall Islands in 1979, de Brum was the first foreign minister of the not yet fully sovereign republic until 1987. For the second time, de Brum took over the Foreign Office at the beginning of 2008, when he was called into his cabinet by the newly elected President Litokwa Tomeing . In late February 2009 he was fired by Tomeing and replaced by John Silk . De Brum took a confrontational stance towards the United States - which finances a large part of the Marshall Islands state budget - and had openly criticized the President on the matter. De Brum returned to government after Christopher Loeak was elected in early 2012. Loeak made him Minister in Assistance to the President , whose duties are equivalent to those of a Vice President. On March 17, 2014, de Brum became Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands for the third time.

The most important topics for de Brum's political work were climate change , from which the Marshall Islands are particularly at risk from rising sea levels , and nuclear disarmament . Commenting on a lawsuit brought before the International Court of Justice in April 2014 against eight nuclear powers , de Brum said: “Our people have suffered the catastrophic and irreparable damage of these weapons and we vow to keep fighting so that no one else on earth experiences these atrocities . ”Together with the people of the Marshall Islands, de Brum received the Right Livelihood Award , known as the“ Alternative Nobel Prize ”, in 2015 “ in recognition of their vision and courage to take legal action against the nuclear powers for their disarmament obligations not comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ”. In the same year he received the Nuclear-Free Future Award in the Solutions category.

At the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in mid-December 2015 , he succeeded in forming a coalition ('High Ambition Coalition', translated as 'Coalition with ambitious goals') between developing and industrialized countries. This played a key role in ensuring that the climate conference ended successfully with the Paris Agreement .

Others

Tony de Brum was also a member of the parliament of the Marshall Islands ( Nitijeļā ), he was last elected in 2011 as one of the representatives of Kwajalein . In December 2015 he was not re-elected.

Web links

Commons : Tony de Brum  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Portrait at rightlivelihoodaward.org (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tony de Brum, Voice of Pacific Islands on Climate Change, Dies at 72
2. ^ Obituary: Tony de Brum, global voice in the fight against climate change . In: The Scotsman . ( scotsman.com [accessed September 5, 2017]).
3. ^ Marshallese-English Dictionary; Author: Abo, Takaji; Bender, Byron W .; Capelle, Alfred; DeBrum, Tony
4. ↑ Fischer World Almanac 2009
5. ↑ Climate change: Marshall Islands already affected . Euronews . Retrieved April 27, 2014.
6. ^ Marshall Islands are suing nuclear powers in The Hague . Heise online . April 26, 2014. Retrieved April 27, 2014.
7. ↑ www.rightlivelihood.org: press release (pdf)
8. ↑ tagesspiegel.de: Agreement: Climate targets should be reviewed every five years
9. ↑ theguardian.com : How the historic Paris deal over climate change was finally agreed (13 December 2015)
10. ^ Marshall Islands minister Tony de Brum loses election (December 7, 2015)

predecessor	Office	successor
- Gerald Zackios Phillip H. Muller	Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands 1979–1987 2008–2009 2014–2016	Charles Domnick John Silk