(May 21, 1851-September 29, 1925), the «spiritual father» of the League of Nations, was a man of prodigious capabilities and diversified interests. A statesman, jurist, artist, and scholar, Léon Bourgeois, in the course of a long career, held almost every major office available in the French government of the Third Republic.

The son of a clock-maker of Jurassian and Burgundian descent, Bourgeois lived most of his life in Paris in an eighteenth-century townhouse on the rue Palatine. He was an insatiable student, reflective, diligent, enthusiastic, and possessed of a happy propensity for becoming involved in whatever he did. Concerned throughout his life with the improvement of man's condition through education, justice under the law, medical care, and the abolition of war, he was that political anomaly, a politician without personal ambition, who twice refused to run for the presidency of the Republic despite assurances that he could easily capture it.

As a schoolboy at the Massin Institution in Paris, Bourgeois displayed his intelligence, leadership, and oratorical flair early. He continued his education at the Lycée Charlemagne, and, after fighting in an artillery regiment during the Franco-Prussian War, enrolled in the Law School of the University of Paris. His education was remarkably broad. He studied Hinduism and Sanskrit, worked in the fine arts, becoming knowledgeable in music and adept in sculpture - indeed, at the height of his political career he exercised his talent as a craftsman, so it is reported, by drawing caricatures of his colleagues in cabinet meetings.

In 1876, after having practiced law for several years, he assumed his first public office as deputy head of the Claims Department in the Ministry of Public Works. In rapid succession he became secretary-general of the Prefecture of the Marne (1877), under-prefect of Reims (1880), prefect of the Tarn (1882), secretary-general of the Seine (1883), prefect of the Haute-Garonne (1885), director of personnel in the Ministry of the Interior (1886), director of departmental and communal affairs (1887). In November of 1887, at the age of thirty-six, he was appointed chief commissioner of the Paris police.

When in February, 1888, Bourgeois defeated the formidable General Boulanger to become deputy from the Marne, his political future was assured. He joined the Left in the Chamber, attending the congresses of the Radical-Socialist Party and rapidly becoming their most renowned orator. He was named undersecretary of state in Floquet's cabinet (1888), elected deputy from Reims (1889), chosen minister of the Interior in the Tirard cabinet (1890).

As minister of public instruction in Freycinet's cabinet from 1890 to 1892 and again in 1898 under Brisson, Bourgeois instituted major reforms in the educational structure, reconstituting the universities by regrouping the faculties, reforming both the secondary and primary systems, and extending the availability of postgraduate instruction. When he gave up the education portfolio in 1892, he accepted that of the Ministry of Justice for two years.

On November 1, 1895, Bourgeois formed his own government. His political program included the enactment of a general income tax, the establishment of a retirement plan for workers, and implementation of plans for the separation of church and state, but his government succumbed, not quite six months old, to a constitutional fight over finances.

Chairman of the French delegation to the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, Bourgeois presided over the Third Commission, which dealt with international arbitration, and, together with the chairmen of the British and American delegations, was responsible for the success of the proposal adopted by the Conference to establish a Permanent Court of Arbitration. In early 1903, after the Court had become a reality, he was designated a member.

Bourgeois became president of the Chamber of Deputies in 1902; briefly withdrew from public life in 1904 because of poor health; traveled for a time in Spain, Italy, and the Near East; resisted the urging of his friends to run for the presidency; sought and won election as senator from the Marne in 1905, an office to which he was continuously elected until his death; became minister of foreign affairs under Sarrien in 1906.

In 1907, Bourgeois represented his country at the second Hague Peace Conference where he served as chairman of the First Commission on questions relating to arbitration, boards of inquiry, and pacific settlement of disputes. His speeches at The Hague and at other peace conferences were published in 1910 under the title Pour la Société des Nations.

Soon after the turn of the century, Bourgeois twice declined the invitation of the president of the Republic to form governments, but he continued his services to the nation in other posts. He was minister of public works under Poincaré (1912), minister of foreign affairs under Ribot (1914), minister of state during the war, minister of public works (1917).

In January of 1918, heading an official commission of inquiry on the question of a League of Nations, he presented a draft for such an organization. President of a newly formed French Association for the League of Nations, he attended the 1919 international congress, convened in Paris, of various organizations interested in establishing a League, and in the same year served as the French representative on the League of Nations Commission chaired by Woodrow Wilson. He brought out another collection of his speeches at this time, Le Pacte de 1919 et la Société des Nations.

The culmination of Bourgeois' career came in 1920 when he assumed the presidency of the French Senate, was unanimously elected the first president of the Council of the League of Nations, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Because of deteriorating health and approaching blindness, he was unable to travel to Oslo to accept the prize in person, and in 1923 he retired from the Senate. He died at Château d'Oger, near Epérnay, of uremic poisoning at the age of seventy-four. The French people honored him with a public funeral.

Countless people, facing persecution the world over - people living and those as yet unborn - have reason to thank Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International. For it was his inspiration in the 1960s that launched what was soon dubbed "one of the larger lunacies of our time": a worldwide citizens' movement to expose and confront government injustice.

Born on 31 July 1921, Peter Benenson is the grandson of the Russian-Jewish banker Grigori Benenson and son of the notable Flora Solomon who raised him alone after the death of her husband, British Army colonel John Solomon. He was tutored privately by WH Auden, then went to Eton and Oxford where he studied history.

His flair for controversy emerged early, when his complaint to the headmaster of Eton about the poor quality of the school's food prompted a letter to his mother warning of her son's "revolutionary tendencies". At age 16, he launched his first campaign: to get school support, during the Spanish Civil War, for the newly-formed Spanish Relief Committee which was helping Republican war orphans. He himself "adopted" one of the babies, helping to pay for its support.

His concern about political imprisonment and mistreatment was inspired by Arthur Koestler's Spanish Testament, which described the horrors of imprisonment and threatened execution by the Fascists. It was this concern that led to his next campaign - the plight of Jews who had fled from Hitler's Germany. Despite some opposition, he succeeded in getting his school friends and their families to raise £4,000 to bring two young German Jews to Britain, thus very likely saving their lives. After leaving Eton, he helped his politically committed mother with finding homes in various countries for refugee children who arrived in London.

After his graduation from Oxford he joined the British army, where he worked in the Ministry of Information press office. While still in the army after the war had ended he studied law and left the forces to become a practising lawyer. He also joined the Labour Party, becoming a leading member of the Society of Labour Lawyers.

International Reputation
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) sent him to Spain as its observer at trials of trade unionists in the early 1950s where Mr Benenson was appalled by what he saw both in the courtrooms and in the prisons. In one instance he was so outraged by the proceedings that he drew up a list of complaints with which he confronted the trial judge over dinner. The trial ended with acquittals, a rarity in Fascist Spain.

It was through such activities that he began to acquire an international reputation. In Cyprus he helped and advised Greek Cypriot lawyers whose clients had fallen foul of their British rulers. He managed to bring together Labour, Liberal and Conservative lawyers and get them to send observers to Hungary in the throes of the 1956 uprising and ensuing trials, and to South Africa where a major "treason trial" was due to take place. The relative success of these two schemes led to the formation of "Justice", another initiative which, like Amnesty International, has had a distinguished record of work in the defence of the rule of law for more than three decades.

It was this constant activity that laid the groundwork for his main endeavour, the 1961 launching of Amnesty International. The catalyst was his sense of outrage on reading a news item about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in a Lisbon cafe who had drunk a toast to liberty.

As he himself put it: "It was in 1960 I think that these thoughts came to a head in my mind. It was during World Refugee Year which was the first of those great international years. That one was set up to try to empty the displaced person camps all over Europe and it was a tremendous success. That led me to think that perhaps we could have another year to try to empty the concentration camps."

So, with the publication of a front page appeal in The Observer newspaper titled "The Forgotten Prisoners", Amnesty International was born. The term "prisoner of conscience" soon became common currency and the movement's logo, a candle surrounded by barbed wire, became a worldwide symbol of hope and freedom.

For the first few years Mr Benenson worked tirelessly for the new, burgeoning movement supplying much of the early vital financial resources, going on research missions himself to country after country, and playing a part in all the organisation's affairs. On one occasion, in order to get into a particularly inaccessible country (Haiti), he posed as a British folk artist.

Controversy
Controversy became Amnesty International's metier, with its exposures of abuses by BOSS, the South African security apparatus, leading to attacks on its small London office. Revelations of efforts by the British Government to send relief to political prisoners in Southern Rhodesia led to press criticism. It was out of the experience of those early days that new operating principles were forged upon which Amnesty International was later to grow into the premiere human rights organization in the world - political impartiality, independence from governments, and rigorous accuracy of information.

"At that time we were still putting our toes in the water and learning as we went on," Mr Benenson later reflected. "We tried every technique of publicity and we were very grateful to the widespread help of journalists and television crews throughout the world who not only sent us information about the names of prisoners but also, whenever they could, gave space to stories about prisoners. It's the publicity function of Amnesty that I think has made its name so widely known, not only to readers in the world, but to governments - and that's what matters."

In 1966 a major internal crisis erupted over an Amnesty report on the torture of Adeni suspects by British forces. Mr Benenson alleged that the organization was being infiltrated by British intelligence and should move its headquarters to a neutral country. An independent investigation did not support his claim and he retired temporarily from the organization to devote himself to a private world of prayer and writing: he was a devout convert to Catholicism.

But he has not given up campaigning for a better world. He found a society for people with coeliac disease - a condition from which he suffers himself - with the goal of increasing awareness of and knowledge about the illness. In the 1980s he became the chair of the newly created Association of Christians Against Torture and in the early 1990s organized help for the orphans of Ceaucescu's Romania.

Enthusiasm
He has never lost his enthusiasm for Amnesty International and with the appointment of a Swedish Secretary General Thomas Hammarberg in the mid-1980s returned to an active role in the movement as a speaker and campaigner on its behalf. He does not, however, always agree with the organization's policies: for instance, he publicly disapproved of its decision not to adopt as a prisoner of conscience Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli imprisoned for exposing his country's nuclear weapons program.

He was the first to use the words which have since found themselves on posters, T-shirts and postcards in dozens of languages all over the world: "The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who "disappeared". That's what the candle is for...."

He received The Mirror's Pride of Britain Lifetime Achievement Award on Tuesday 10 April 2001. He accepted this award on behalf of AI's worldwide membership in a ceremony broadcast on ITV to an estimated audience of 9 million people.

To mark AI's 40th anniversary, Peter Benenson said: "Forty years on, Amnesty International has secured many victories. Its files are full of letters from former prisoners of conscience or torture victims thanking the organisation for making a difference. Torture is now banned by international agreement. Every year more countries reject the death penalty. The world will soon have an International Criminal Court that will be able to ensure that those accused of the worst crimes in the world will face justice. The Court's very existence will deter some crimes.

But the challenges are still great. Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or 'disappearance' to be carried out by their officials with impunity.

Those who today still feel a sense of impotence can do something: they can support Amnesty International. They can help it to stand up for freedom and justice.

In 1961 I wrote 'Pressure of opinion a hundred years ago brought about the emancipation of the slaves'. Pressure of opinion is now needed to help Amnesty International achieve its ultimate objective: to close for business. Only then, when the last prisoner of conscience has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world's people, will our work be done."

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, född 14 november 1922 i Kairo. Gift med Leia Maria Boutros-Ghali. Medlem i koptiska ortodoxa kyrkan.

1949 doktorerade han i internationell rätt vid Paris universitet. Mellan 1949 - 1977 var han professor i internationell rätt och internationella relationer vid Kairos universitet. Mellan 1977 - 1991 var han vice utrikesminister i Egypten. 1991 valdes han till FN:s generalsekreterare.

Som generalsekreterare inledde han ett program för att omorganisera FN och stärka generalsekreterarens ställning. Han tog bl a initiativ till Dagordning för fred och Dagordning för utveckling. När han tillträdde generalsekreterarposten uppgav han att han endast tänkte sitta en mandatperiod, med tanke på sin ålder. 74 år gammal kandiderade han ändå till en andra mandatperiod. USA hade dock invändningar mot Boutros-Ghalis arbete med att reformera och effektivisera FN:s arbete och lade in sitt veto mot hans kandidatur. Boutros-Ghalis drog därför tillbaka sin kandidatur och avgick sedan 1996 då hans första och enda mandatperiod avslutades.

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld, född 29 juli 1905, död 18 september 1961. Son till sedermera statsministern och landshövdingen i Stockholm Hjalmar Hammarskjöld och hans hustru Agnes, f. Almquist. Nationalekonom, ämbetsman, konsultativt statsråd 1951-1953, litteraturvetare, friluftsentusiast, medlem av flera socialdemokratiska regeringar även om han aldrig gick med i partiet. Om man läser hans bok Vägmärken ser man hur djupt rotad den svenske diplomaten var i kristen tradition. FN:s generalsekreterare från 1953 till 1961, då han omkom vid en flygolycka i Kongo, ledamot av Svenska Akademien 1954. Mottagare av Nobels fredspris 1961 postumt. Skrifter: Vägmärken, Bonnier, 1963.

Trygve Halvdan Lie, född 16 juli 1896 i Oslo, norsk politiker (Arbeiderpartiet). Lie var justitieminister 1935-1939 och sedan handelsminister 1939. Vid krigsutbrottet 1939 var han delaktig i de åtgärder som ledde till att den norska flottan hamnade under de allierades kontroll. Efter andra världskrigets slut 1945 blev han utrikesminister och ledde den norska delegation som deltog i arbetet med att bygga upp och utforma stadgarna för FN. 1946 blev han FN:s första generalsekreterare, en befattning som han innehade till 1952.

Den här artikeln är hämtad från http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trygve_Lie