Robert Muller, the former Assistant Secretary-General for Economic and Social Service of the United Nations and the Honorary President of the Association of World Citizens died on 20 September 2010. He was brought up in Alsace-Lorraine still marked by the results of the First World War. He joined the French Resistance Movement during the Second World War and then earned a Doctorate in Law and Economics at the University of Strasbourg.

Determined to work for peace, he joined the United Nations Secretariat in 1948 where he worked on economic and social issues. For many years he was the Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. His work with ECOSOC brought him into close cooperation with NGOs which he always encouraged. He was particularly concerned with education which would prepare people for active citizenship in an interdependent world and was awarded the UNESCO Peace Education Prize in 1989.

After 40 years of service to the United Nations, he “retired” and devoted himself to the University for Peace in Costa Rica, an institution that he had helped to create when still a UN officer. He lived part of each year in Costa Rica on a small farm near the University for Peace. The rest of the year he lived in California and carried on an intensive program of writing and speaking.

I had the pleasure of knowing Robert Muller well as he was often in Geneva for his UN economic and social work and, at the time, had a home in France near Geneva. His view on the world was much influenced by two French thinkers who also spent most of their lives outside France, Pierre Teihard de Chardin and Albert Schweitzer.

Robert Muller had participated actively in efforts to develop reconciliation between France and Germany after the Second World War, an effort which led to his understanding of the importance of forgiveness as expressed in his prose-poem “To Forgive”

René Wadlow