Erik Colban

[4] He was also one of four Norwegian members of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, together with Jacob Aars Rynning, Finn Palmstrøm and Terje Wold.

[5] Colban was appointed Knight First Class of the Order of St. Olav in 1912, promoted to Commander with Star in 1931 and awarded the Grand Cross in 1946.

As the son of Erik Andreas Colban (1841–1900) who was a Captain in the Army and Caroline Emilie Biermann he was part of a long line of clergy and military men and officials dating back to the pre-1814 Danish-Norwegian Kingdom.

He carried out his responsibilities in Stockholm until he was offered to move to Rio de Janeiro where he was again appointed chargé d'affaires in 1911.

He traveled back and forth to London where he met with Sir Cyril William Hurcomb and negotiated payment for the ships that Norway provided for Allied forces.

As a consequence of the treaties of the 1919- Paris Peace Conference- the League of Nations found itself responsible for monitoring and defending minority groups across Europe.

Erik Colban, who became the director of the minorities section of the League of Nations and it's 'spiritual father' in 1919, found himself to be a member of an entirely new class of international bureaucrats.

As the League Council initially distanced itself from the responsibility of dealing with minority issues, it gave Colban the liberty to further develop the petition system (as seen below).

Colban established 1: A formal procedure for receiving and distributing minority petitions 2: A "committee-of-three" system, whereby every petition deemed receivable by the secretariat was examined by an ad hoc group of council members (the acting president + two selected governments) to determine whether a treaty violation had occurred and if it should or should not be reported to the council.

The challenging states attempted to wreck Colban's system of Committee-of-three by means of obstruction and proposals for "reform".

This was a compromise in order to gain support from the neighbouring states of Germany and the German government and was advised by Colban.

[18] When Germany received its permanent seat at the council in 1926, Colban started tutoring Stresemann on how to attend to minority affairs.

He even succeeded in convincing the German delegates to wait a year before participating in the minorities section, until they understood the situation completely.

[19] Working with the Germans, Colban managed to convince them that theLeague's system of secret compromise was effective and desirable.

In his late career, Colban held several important positions working both as an international bureaucrat and as a representative for the Norwegian government.

Later, Colban would be involved in setting up the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission (Nortraship), a crucial contribution to the Allied War effort.

In 1941 Colban headed the committee drafting the Norwegian-British military agreement, and it was not least thanks to his efforts that Norway reached a very favourable settlement with Britain in 1943.

In 1943, he became a member of the United Nation's War Crimes Commission and the inter-allied committee that set up the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

As a final point in his career from 1948 to 1950 Colban became the personal representative for the UN secretary general Trygve Lie, in the negotiations between India and Pakistan concerning Kashmir.

This was due to the problems he experienced arising from the interference of the League of Nations into minority politics in Eastern Europe during the interwar period.

Acknowledgement of the sovereignty of the nation-states was a key concern of the UN and this was a point in its Charts, which was not to be changed, in order to secure peace.

He thought that the specialized agencies of the UN were a very important part of the organisation, their work indirect, but indispensable for world peace.

One of his main statements was that the tasks of the UN should be both political and non-political, meaning that it should secure peace, but at the same time working towards solving economic, social, cultural and humanitarian issues.