Victor Hermann Umbricht

Victor Hermann Umbricht (born October 25, 1915 in Endingen ; † July 14, 1988 in Basel ) was a Swiss lawyer , diplomat and board member of Ciba-Geigy .

Life

Umbricht was a clerk in Baden from 1939 to 1941 . In 1941 he joined the Federal Political Department , for which he worked as a diplomat in Ankara, London and Washington until 1953 . From 1953 to 1957 he was Deputy Director of the World Bank in Washington, responsible for Europe, Africa and Australasia. In 1957 he returned to Switzerland and was Director of the Federal Finance Administration until 1960 .

In the same year he switched to the private sector and joined Ciba AG. In 1960/61 he was briefly active as a UN financial advisor in the Congo , where he co-founded the central bank . In 1962 he went to the USA and headed the Ciba branch there until 1965. After returning to Switzerland, he was a member and delegate of the Board of Directors of Ciba-Geigy AG until 1985 . This released him for international humanitarian tasks.

From 1968 to 1976 he served as President of the Mekongrate (organization for the economic development of the Mekong region). From 1972 to 1973 he headed the UN Organization for Famine Reduction and Reconstruction in Bangladesh (UNROD). From 1970 to 1979 Umbricht was a member and vice-president of the ICRC . In addition, ICRC missions in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico were carried out under his leadership from 1977 to 1979. With the mandate of the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program , he was a mediator in East Africa from 1977 to 1984 with the rank of UN Under-Secretary-General after Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda had dissolved the East African community in a scandal and blocked each other's assets. After lengthy negotiations, an unbundling agreement was signed in 1984.

Victor Umbricht was also involved in domestic politics: from the 1970s he had been a member of the advisory commission on Switzerland's accession to the UN, which he was skeptical of. In 1962 he founded the Swiss Center in New York and was its president until 1970. From 1970 to 1986 he was head of the Swiss-Chinese Society. In total, Victor Umbricht was employed by four UN General Secretaries .

His estate is in the Archives for Contemporary History at ETH Zurich .

Honors

• 1966 honorary doctorate from the University of Basel
• 1984 Grotius Medal from the Hague Academy for International Law
• 1987 Honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich
• 1987 Awarded by the City of Los Angeles for his humanitarian work

Publications

• Multilateral mediation. Practical Experiences and Lessons. Dordrecht, Boston 1989, ISBN 90-247-3779-6

Web links

• Daniel Schwane: Umbricht, Victor. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Victor H. Umbricht's estate in the Archives for Contemporary History
• Daniel Schwane: Global commitment before globalization , article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from July 14, 2008
• Documents by and about Victor H. Umbricht in the Dodis database of Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland