Prof. Dr. h.c. Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans was born on 5th September 1944. He is married and has two adult children. Since 2011 he is Chancellor of the Australian National University. From January 2000 till June 2009 he was President and CEO of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the independent global NGO working with some 140 full-time staff on five continents to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.

Gareth Evans went to Melbourne High School, and holds first class honours degrees in Law from Melbourne University (BA, LLB (Hons)) and in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University (MA). Before entering the Australian Parliament in 1978, he was an academic lawyer specialising in constitutional and civil liberties law and a barrister specialising in industrial law. He became a Queens Counsel (QC) in 1983. He came to Crisis Group after 21 years in Australian politics, thirteen of them as a Cabinet Minister. As Foreign Minister (1988-96) he was best known internationally for his role in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, helping conclude the Chemical Weapons Convention, and helping initiate new Asia Pacific regional economic and security architecture. He is currently a member of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention.

Important dates:

Awards:

He was Australian Humanist of the Year in 1990, won the ANZAC Peace Prize in 1994 for his work on Cambodia, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2001, and was awarded Honorary Doctorates of Laws by Melbourne University in 2002 and Carleton University in 2005. In the United States he received in 1995 the $150 000 Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order for his Foreign Policy article "Cooperative Security and Intrastate Conflict". Other international awards include the Chilean Order of Merit (Grand Cross), given in 1999 primarily for his work in initiating APEC.

Publications:

Gareth Evans has written or edited eight books – including Co-operating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s (1993) and Australia's Foreign Relations (1991, 2nd ed 1995), and has published over 90 chapters in books and journal articles (and many more newspaper and magazine articles) on foreign relations, politics, human rights and legal reform.

[June 2011]