Academic Background  and Career Highlights

Dr. Daniel STAUFFACHER, a former Ambassador of Switzerland,  has a Master’s degree in International Economic Affairs from Columbia University, New York and a Ph.D. in law from the University of Zürich. He worked for the district court of Zurich and the Swiss private sector before joining the United Nations.

In 1982 he joined the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in New York and subsequently the  United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Laos (1984) and China (1987). In Laos he was responsible for UNDP’s rural development and poverty alleviation programmes and in  China for managing UNDP’s technical assistance support to the economic and administrative reform program of the Chinese Government.

In 1990 he joined the Swiss Federal Office for Foreign Economic Affairs (Bawi), where he was in charge of Swiss Mixed Credit Financing Programmes for investment projects in India, Pakistan and China.

In 1992 he became a Division Chief of the Federal Office for Foreign Economic Affairs,  Division for Financial Cooperation with Central and Eastern European Countries,  responsible for financing of investment projects (mainly in the environment and infrastructure sectors), balance of payment support programmes, credit guarantees for private sector financing of investment projects, debt for environment swaps, technical assistance projects and the elaboration of first Swiss law on Economic and Financial Cooperation with Central and Eastern European Countries.

In this position he was also instrumental in organizing on behalf of the Swiss Government, the Luzern Conference “Environment for Europe” 1993, which called for the elaboration of an Environmental Action Plan for Europe. In 1995, he was posted to the Swiss Mission to the European Union in Brussels as the Counsellor for Economic and Financial Affairs, responsible for financial services, internal market, investment policy, Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), Energy Charter Treaty, EU Enlargement.

In 1999, he became an Ambassador of Switzerland to the United Nations in Geneva and the Special Representative of the Swiss Government for the preparation and organization of the World Summit on Social Development in June 2000 in Genevawww.un.org/esa/socdev/geneva2000.

In 2002 he was a member of the Swiss Delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa.

On behalf of the State Secretariat for Foreign Economic Affairs www.seco.admin.ch he was the co-convener of the first Global Compact Meeting in Switzerland (2002): The UN Global Compact and Swiss Business: Making Global Responsibility Work for Business and  Development, 29 October 2002, Palais des Nations, Geneva.

Daniel Stauffacher was also the Swiss Ambassador and the Special Representative of  the Swiss Government for the diplomatic preparation, organization and hosting of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), that was held in Geneva in 2003. He was a Co-Chairman of the Bureau of the WSIS preparatory Committee and Chairman of one of its subcommittee (http://web.archive.org/web/20040403164916/www.wsisgeneva2003.org/home.html).

He was subsequently Switzerland’s Ambassador to the WSIS in Tunis in 2005 and an advisor  to the UN in this regard. During that time he launched the ICT4Peace project (www.ict4peace.org) which resulted in the adoption of paragraph 36 of the WSIS Tunis Commitment. He was a member of the former UN ICT Task Force (www.unicttaskforce.org), the former UN Task Force on Financial Mechanisms for ICT4D, and the Strategy Group on Information Society of the Swiss Government.

In December 2005 he left the Swiss Government after 15 years of Government service. He became President of Wisekey (Switzerland) SA, an internet security company (2006 -2007). With Ambassador Blaise Godet he was co-founder and Executive Coordinator of the GenevaNetwork, Geneva (www.genevanetwork.net).  In 2007 he created his own consulting firm: Dr. Daniel Stauffacher + Partner (www.stauffacherconsulting.ch).

Present  Positions

He is President of Dr. Daniel Stauffacher + Partner (www.stauffacherconsulting.ch),  the Founder of the ICT4Peace project and Co-Founder and  Chairman of  the ICT4Peace Foundation, (www.ict4peace.org), a  Co-Founder and President of the Geneva Security Forum (www.genevasecurityforum.org),  a Member of the Board of Directors, World Wide Web Foundation (www.webfoundation.org), a  Senior Advisor, Gulf Research Center Foundation, Geneva (www.grc.ae) and a member of the Board of the Earth Council.

Daniel Stauffacher is also a Special Advisor to the UN Undersecretary-General of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN DESA (www.un.org/esa/desa), and a Special Advisor to the UN Assistant Secretary General and  Chief InformationTechnology Officer (www.oict-un.org).

Publications

• Der Sendevertrag, eine rechtstatsächliche Untersuchung, Dissertation, University of Zurich 1979.
• Europäische Union: Vor einer neuen Erweiterung (Die Volkswirtschaft 1997, 6/18);Europäische Union: Beginn des Erweiterungsprozesses im Frühjahr 1998 (Die Volkswirtschaft 1998, 3/17); Elektronisches Geld und Finanzdienstleistungen im EU-Binnenmarkt – Chancen und Herausforderungen (Die Volkswirtschaft, 1998, 3/37); The Challenges of financial services on the Internet. AGEFI: Finance and Technology, April 1998; Arbeits- und Sozialnormen für das Global Village (Stephan Brupbacher und Botschafter Daniel Stauffacher, Die Volkswirtschaft, 1999, 11/20); Geneva 2000: Der nächste Schritt in der Weiterentwicklung der sozialen Dimension der Globalisierung (Daniel Stauffacher, Die Volkswirtschaft, 2000, 6/6); Erster Weltgipfel über die Informationsgesellschaft vom Dezember 2003 in Genf (D. Stauffacher und Alain Modoux, Die Volkswirtschaft 2/2003); The First World Summit on the Information Society, Al-Siyassa, Egyptian quarterly periodical, December 2003, (Englisch); The United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva: A report (D. Stauffacher und T. Schneider, Die Volkswirtschaft 6/2004).
• The World Summit on the Information Society: Moving from the Past into the Future, edited by Daniel Stauffacher and Wolfgang Kleinwächter, with and opening statement by Kofi Annan and preface by Yoshio Utsumi, UN ICT Task Force Series 8, New York (http://www.ict4peace.org/articles/WSIS%20Past2Future%20ebook.pdf).
• Information and Communication Technology for Peace.  The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict, A Report by Daniel Stauffacher, William Drake, Paul Currion, Julia Steinberger, with a preface by Kofi Annan and a foreword by Micheline Calmy-Rey, UN ICT Task Force Series 11, New York, November 2005 (http://www.ict4peace.org/articles/ict4peace_ebook.pdf).
• International Geneva: Thoughts for the Future. Blaise Godet and Daniel Stauffacher, September 2006. International Geneva: Time for Action. Blaise Godet and Daniel Stauffacher, August 2008. (www.genevanetwork.net).
• ICT for disaster management in least developed countries and small islands in the Asia Pacific Region, Daniel Stauffacher and Sanjana Hattotuwa, June 2008. ICT4Peace Foundation. (http://www.ict4peace.org/view_files-1-v-133.html).
• Interim Report: Stocktaking of UN Crisis Information Management Capabilities, Sanjana Hattotuwa and Daniel Stauffacher, February 2009. ICT4Peace Foundation. (http://www.ict4peace.org/view_files-1-v-165.html).
• Haiti and beyond: Getting it right in Crisis Information Management, Sanjana Hattotuwa and Daniel Stauffacher, March 2010. ICT4Peace Foundation. (http://ict4peace.org/view_blog_posts-1-v-213.html).
• Cross-fertilisation of UN Common Operational Datasets and Crisismapping, Sanjana Hattotuwa and Daniel Stauffacher, October 2010. ICT4Peace Foundation.  (http://ict4peace.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/UN-and-CrisisMapping.pdf).
• Peacebuilding in the Information Age – Sifting Hype from Reality. Edited by Daniel Stauffacher, Barbara Weekes, Urs Gasser, Colin Mclay, Michel Best, January 2011. ICT4Peace Foundation, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and GeorgiaTech. (http://ict4peace.org/updates/peacebuilding-in-the-information-age-sifting-hype-from-reality).