“A human being also has the right to live in dignity and equality as well as security.
There can be no security without real peace, and peace must be built on the firm foundation of human rights”.Sergio Vieira de Mello
Sergio Vieira de Mello was born on March 15, 1948, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Son of a diplomat and historian, he lived abroad since childhood, accompanying his father in several missions around the world.
In 1969, after graduating in Philosophy at the University of Sorbonne in Paris, he moved to Geneva and did interviews to work in various international organizations. At the age of 21, he joined UNHCR, admitted as a writer in French. Also in 1969, his father was compulsorily retired from the cadres of the Foreign Ministry by the Brazilian military regime.
In 1971, Vieira de Mello was sent for his first field mission on behalf of the agency: to lead the repatriation and integration of thousands of refugees to the newly created state of Bangladesh. According to Samantha Power, author of the biography “The Man Who Wanted to Save the World”, in Bangladesh there was the moment in which Vieira de Mello found himself: when he saw the extreme poverty and the large number of refugees, the ideals that had motivated him until then gained life and soul and the young man realized that if he wanted to turn them into reality, he should become a man of action. In parallel, he continued his studies at the Sorbonne, obtaining a doctorate in 1974 with praise.
As one of UNHCR’s youngest representatives in field operations, Vieira de Mello was scheduled to lead the repatriation of Sudanese in 1972 and Mozambicans in 1975. In the meantime, he married a Frenchwoman Annie Personnaz, with whom he had two children.
In 1978, he was appointed UNHCR Regional Representative for Latin America, working mainly with the resettlement of refugees from the dictatorial regimes that ravaged the continent.
In 1981, he was appointed Political Adviser to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in his first peacekeeping experience. Two years later, he returned to Geneva, where he worked in the UNHCR Personnel Department and he was responsible for training the agency’s staff.
In the following years, he continued to work at UNHCR Headquarters in Geneva, serving in various capacities: Chief of Staff of the High Commissioner, Head of the Secretariat of the Executive Committee, Director of the Division for Asia and Director of External Relations of UNHCR.
In this period, he designed and encouraged various projects that would change the institution’s policy, such as the “Global Action Plan” (CPA) to solve the problem of the Vietnamese “boat people”. Vieira de Mello also used the period of stability, without major displacements for field missions, to finish his doctoral thesis, crowning his studies with honorable mention in the Sorbonne in 1985.
In 1991, he was appointed by the High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, as Special Envoy to Cambodia. With the establishment of the United Nations Transition Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), Vieira de Mello became Head of the Repatriation Sector, responsible for the successful return operation of 370,000 Cambodian refugees.
In 1993, he was sent to another peacekeeping operation, this time in Bosnia, as Political Director of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). In 1994, he traveled to the capital of Croatia as Head of Civil Affairs of the UN operation.
Between 1994 and 1996, Vieira de Mello assumed the role of Director of Operations and Planning in Geneva, as a responsible for organizing the Conference on Refugees and Migration in Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), meeting that gave rise to the development of a Plan of Action to regulate migratory flows as a result of the fragmentation of the former Soviet republics.
In 1996, he was appointed Adviser to the High Commissioner with the title of United Nations Under-Secretary-General. He also served as United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for the Great Lakes region of Africa in the same year.
In 1998, Vieira de Mello was appointed at the UN headquarters in New York as Deputy General Secretary of the Department of Humanitarian Action (OCHA). The following year, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him as his interim special representative, responsible for the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).
