Lakhdar Brahimi

Lakhdar Brahimi was born in Algeria in 1934. He studied law and political sciences in France and Algeria. From 1963 to 1970, he worked as permanent representative to the Arab League. In 1971, he moved to London to become the Algerian ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Lakhdar Brahimi served as an official in the Arab League from 1984 to 1991. He was then called in the Algerian government, where he was appointed as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

It was in 1993 that Lakhdar Brahimi started his career in the United Nations. He was charged with special missions to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1993 and to Yemen and Liberia in 1994.

In 2000, Lakhdar Brahimi chaired an independent panel to review the UN peacekeeping operations. In this role, he issued a report, known as the “Brahimi Report”, assessing peacekeeping operations and pointing out a number of dysfunctions on the political, strategic, operational and organisational level.

The outbreak of the war on Iraq in 2003 precipitated the evolution of Lakhdar Brahimi to the position of Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General, where he headed missions in Iraq between January and June 2004.

From January 2004 to December 2005, Lakhdar Brahimi was appointed as Under-Secretary-General in the UN. It was the last position he held in that institution.

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