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Assembly appoints five new members to Committee

10-12-2012 News Release 12/242

Geneva (ICRC) – At its meeting on 15 November, the Assembly of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) appointed Hugo Banziger, Jacques Chapuis, Alexis Keller, Doris Schopper and Heidi Tagliavini as new members of the Committee. The Committee now has 23 active members who together exercise oversight over the ICRC.

Hugo Banziger is chief risk officer at Deutsche Bank. He is also a member of a high-level expert group on reforming the European Union’s banking sector, and chairs the Eurex group (Zurich/Frankfurt) board of directors. Mr Banziger is visiting professor at the University of Singapore and at the London School of Economics.

Jacques Chapuis is a practitioner and teacher in psychiatric nursing, anaesthesia and resuscitation. He worked as an ICRC delegate in Pakistan during the mid-1980s. He currently heads the La Source Institute and Faculty of Applied Health Sciences in Lausanne, and is vice-president of the international secretariat of nurses in the French-speaking world.

Alexis Keller is professor of legal history and legal theory at the University of Geneva and visiting professor at the Institut d'études politiques of Paris. In 2003-2004, he served as the Swiss government's special representative for the Middle East peace process. Mr Keller is member of a number of academic societies, research institutes and foundations both in Europe and in the United States.

Doris Schopper, a professor in the medical faculty at the University of Geneva, is director of the Center for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action and head of the independent ethics review board for Médecins Sans Frontières International. She is a past president of the MSF Swiss branch and spent several years in the field. Ms Schopper also worked as a health policy adviser at the World Health Organization and at the Swiss Tropical Institute.

Heidi Tagliavini has been a career diplomat with Switzerland's Federal Department of Foreign Affairs for 30 years. She has served in various capacities in Lima, Moscow, The Hague and Sarajevo, and as deputy State secretary in Bern. Ms Tagliavini has also held high-level positions with the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. Until recently, she was a Diplomat-in-Residence at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

The five new members of the Committee will take up their duties in the first quarter of 2013.

The Assembly, composed of between 15 and 25 members of Swiss nationality, is the supreme governing body of the ICRC. It oversees all the ICRC's activities. It sets general objectives and strategy, and approves the budget and accounts.

For further information, please contact:
Carla Haddad Mardini, ICRC Geneva, tel: +41 22 730 24 05 or +41 79 217 32 26
Sébastien Carliez, ICRC Geneva, tel: +41 22 730 28 81 or +41 79 536 92 37


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