Jakob Kellenberger

Jakob Kellenberger (born 19 October 1944 in Heiden, Switzerland) is a former Swiss diplomat and former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

He wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his doctoral thesis on the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

[4] On 1 January 2000, Jakob Kellenberger was appointed president of the ICRC, a humanitarian organization that, as of July 2011, has some 13,000 staff and a network of over 200 delegations.

The ICRC's large-scale operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and the Near East had and partly still have a particular impact on Jakob Kellenberger's job, as also reflected by his field visits and efforts in the sphere of humanitarian diplomacy.

[5] Managing the ICRC's relationship with the United States after the September 11 attacks in the areas of law and humanitarian diplomacy was one of his greatest challenges.

In difficult conflict situations, he considered it important to get first-hand experience of the reality on the ground, as witnessed by his trips to southern Lebanon during the war of summer 2006 and to Gaza in January 2009, and his numerous visits to Afghanistan and Darfur.