Peter Maurer (born 1956) is a Swiss diplomat who was the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) [1] from 1 July 2012 until October 2022 and is currently President of the Basel Institute on Governance.
Peter Maurer (born 1956) is a Swiss diplomat who was the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) [1] from 1 July 2012 until October 2022 and is currently President of the Basel Institute on Governance.
Maurer was born in Thun, Switzerland. He studied History and International Law in Bern, and was awarded a PhD.
In 1987, Maurer entered the Swiss Diplomatic Service (Federal Department of Foreign Affairs), where he held various positions in Bern and Pretoria, South Africa, before being transferred to New York in 1996 as Deputy Permanent Observer at the Swiss Mission to the United Nations. In 2000, he was appointed Ambassador and head of the division in charge of human security at the headquarters of Switzerland's Foreign Ministry in Berne. [2]
In 2004, Maurer was appointed Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the United Nations in New York. In this position, he endeavoured to integrate Switzerland, which had only recently joined the United Nations, into multilateral networks. In June 2009, the United Nations General Assembly elected Maurer Chairman of the Fifth Committee, in charge of United Nations administrative and budgetary affairs. [3] In addition, he was elected Chairman of the Burundi Configuration of the UN Peacebuilding Commission. In January 2010, Maurer became Switzerland's State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, [4] a position he held until he was elected President of the ICRC, succeeding Jakob Kellenberger in June 2012. [5]
Maurer led the ICRC through a historic budget increase, from 1.1 billion CHF in 2011 to over 1.6 billion CHF in 2015. [6] In addition, he launched the world’s first "humanitarian impact bond" scheme, in which private investors lend €22 million of five-year funding and their repayments depend on what difference the project makes to its clients’ lives. [7]
Since 2019, Maurer has been co-chairing the World Economic Forum High-Level Group on Humanitarian Investing, alongside Børge Brende and Kristalina Georgieva. [8]
In September 2019, he was re-elected as the president of the ICRC for an additional term of 4 years, until October 2022, when he was succeeded by Mirjana Spoljaric Egger. [9]
While president of the ICRC, Maurer earned an annual salary of up to CHF 437’000, while the ICRC was facing significant budget cuts. [10]
Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun [18] 
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental organization for public–private sector collaboration based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer Klaus Schwab.
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Klaus Martin Schwab is a German engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He has acted as the WEF's chairman since founding the organisation in 1971.
Børge Brende is a Norwegian politician and diplomat, and has been the president of the World Economic Forum since 2017. A member of the Conservative Party, he previously was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2017, Minister of the Environment from 2001 to 2004 and Minister of Trade and Industry from 2004 to 2005. He was also a member of the Norwegian Parliament from Sør-Trøndelag between 1997 and 2009.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is a humanitarian organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, and is a three-time Nobel Prize Laureate. State parties (signatories) to the Geneva Convention of 1949 and its Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005 have given the ICRC a mandate to protect victims of international and internal armed conflicts. Such victims include war wounded persons, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants.
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Sir Mark Andrew Lowcock is a British economist and accountant who served as the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator between 2017 and 2021. Prior to his appointment by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on 12 May 2017, Lowcock was the Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development (DFID) from June 2011 to September 2017. He is currently a visiting professor in practice at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. He is also a Trustee/Director and vice-chair of The Howard Partnership Trust, a multi-academy trust of schools in Surrey.
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