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Edvard Hambro (Norway)

Elected President of the twenty-fifth session of the General Assembly

Photo of Edvard Hambro

Edvard Hambro, elected President of the General Assembly at its twenty-fifth session, had been the Permanent Representative of Norway to the United Nations since 1966, after pursuing a career in law, diplomacy, education and politics.

Mr. Hambro was born in Oslo, Norway, on 22 August 1911. He received a degree in law from the University of Oslo (1934) and a doctorate in political sciences from the University of Geneva (1936).

From 1938 to 1940, Mr. Hambro headed the Department of International Relations of the Christian Michelson Institute at Bergen, Norway.

During the Second World War, Mr. Hambro worked in the field of information in the United States for the Norwegian Government and, in 1943, was appointed First Secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London. He was a member of the Norwegian delegation to San Francisco in 1945 and later headed the Legal Section of the United Nations Secretariat in London.

From 1946 to 1953 Mr. Hambro was Registrar of the International Court of Justice. He subsequently taught law, from 1953 1966, at the Norwegian School of Economic Sciences and Commercial Administration at Bergen.

During this period, he gave courses at the University of Cambridge (1953), the University of California at Berkeley (1958) and the Academy of International Law at The Hague (1961). In 1954 Mr. Hambro headed a mission set up by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to study the situation of Chinese refugees in Hong Kong.

Mr. Hambro sat in the Norwegian Parliament from 1961 up to the time of his appointment as Permanent Representative of Norway to the United Nations.

He was Chairman of the Sixth Committee (Legal Committee) at the twenty-second session of the General Assembly in 1967.

He is Chairman of the Appeals Board of the Council of Europe and President of the Permanent Conciliation Commission for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Netherlands. He is also a member of the following organizations: the Appeals Board of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Franco -German Arbitral Tribunal for the Saarland, as well as conciliation commissions established under conventions concluded between the United States and Finland, between Spain and Norway and between Portugal and Switzerland.

He is a member of the Institute of International Law and holds honorary degrees from Luther College, Iowa, and Wagner College, New York.

Mr. Hambro has published in particular Charter of the United Nations (in collaboration with Leland M. Goodrich and, in the case of the third edition in 1969, with Anne Patricia Simons) and the case law of the International Court of Justice, of which five volumes have appeared Mr. Hambro is married and has four children.

His father, Carl Hombro now deceased, presided over the Norwegian Storting for many years and was also the last President of the Assembly of the League of Nations. It was under his auspices that the League set up its headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey, during the war, and he was a member of the Norwegian delegation to San Francisco in 1945.

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