Dr. Daniel Stauffacher
Curriculum Vitae
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 PhD in copyright and broadcasting media law from the University of Zürich. He worked for the District Court of Zurich as a law clerk and was Managing Director of Hans-Rudolf Stauffacher Verlag, a publishing company (1977 – 1982), and its Chairman (1977 – 1989).
He took an early interest in China, which he has been visiting since 1977. 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) as a Assistant Resident Representative (ARR). 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 the Swiss Mixed Credit Financing Programmes for investment projects in India, Pakistan and China.
In 1992, within the Division for Economic Support to Central and Eastern Europe of Bawi, he became a Section Chief for Financial Cooperation with Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Albania, North Macedonia and Slovenia. The tools of cooperations were mainly concessional financing of investment projects (mainly in the environment and infrastructure sectors), balance of payment support programme, credit guarantees for private sector financing of investment projects, debt for environment swaps.
He was also assisting in the elaboration of first Swiss law on Economic and Financial Cooperation with Central and Eastern European Countries and helped organizing 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 UN World Summit on Social Development in June 2000 in Geneva.
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 and moderator 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 Federal Government for the diplomatic preparation, organization and hosting of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), that was held in Geneva in 2003 (http://www.itu.int/wsis/basic/about.html).
In that capacity he was the Director of the Swiss Executive Secretariat for WSIS (http://www.wsis2003geneva.org), a Co-Chairman of the Bureau of the WSIS Preparatory Committee (WSIS Prepcom) and Chairman of one of its Subcommittees.
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 UN SG Kofi Annan’s UN ICT Task Force, Co-Chairman and Member of the High-Level Advisory Group of the UN Global Alliance for ICT for Development (GAID) , a member of the UN Task Force on Financial Mechanisms for ICT for Development. He was a member of 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, a cybersecurity company in Geneva (2006 -2007).
With Ambassador Blaise Godet he was co-founder and Executive Coordinator of the GenevaNetwork, Geneva (www.genevanetwork.net) which published two strategy reports: „International Geneva – Thoughts for the Future“ in which an „Action Line 9 INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY AT THE SERVICE OF HUMANITY“ was proposed (2006).
In 2007 he created his own consulting firm: Dr. Daniel Stauffacher + Partner (www.stauffacherconsulting.ch).
On behalf the Earth Council he participated in the preparations of and at the Conference of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (CoP 15) in Copenhagen, December 2009 (http://unfccc.int/2860.php). At Rio+20 Summit in 2012 in Rio he organized and moderated a Session „The Impact of New Technologies and ICTs on Sustainable Development“.
From 2008 to 2016 he was an Advisor to the UN Assistant Secretary General and Chief Information Technology Officer (UNCITO) (www.oict-un.org), OCHA, DPKO/DFS, WFP, UNHCR, UNDP, UNICEF, OHCHR in the creation, development and implementation of the first ever UN Crisis Information Management Strategy (CiMS).
He was a Co-Founder and President of the Geneva Security Forum (2007 – 2012).
From 2009 – 2015 he was founding Trustee of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation (2009 – 2015) (www.webfoundation.org) and a member of the Foundation Board of the Gulf Research Center Foundation, Geneva (www.grc.ae).
He was a Founding Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Master Programme of Advanced Studies in Humanitarian Logistics and Management (www.mashlm.usi.ch) of the University della Svizzera Italiana (Faculty of Economics), Lugano.
In March 2012, he was appointed by the Office of the UN Secretary General to carry out a review of the UN Global Alliance on ICT4D (GAID) and make recommendations for its future course. Along with with Dr. Armen Orujyan, President of Athgo he was appointed Co-Chair of GAID until December 2012 to carry out this task.
In 2012 Daniel Stauffacher was a member of the Advisory Group (Fachbeirat) of the first Open Government Data Study Switzerland (http://bit.ly/10An6z0) carried out by the Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland. In this context he also co-authored the publication: „The potential and challenges of open data for crisis information management and aid efficiency A preliminary assessment.“
From 2010 to 2013 he was an Advisor to Prof. Dirk Helbing, Chair of Computational Social Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH, Zurich, (http://www.soms.ethz.ch/) for the FuturICT Flagship Project (http://bit.ly/W97J9B).
From 2009 to 2012 he was an Advisor to the Swiss Ministry for Defense, Sports and Civil Protection on matters related to Cybersecurity.
Subsequently he became an Advisor to the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of Governments and International Organisations such as the UN, UN ODA UN CTED, OSCE, OAS, African Union, ASEAN, CLMV Countries on Peace and Security in Cyberspace, including Cybersecurity Capacity Building. He was a member of the Swiss Delegation to the Informal Working Group on Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) for the Cyberspace at OSCE, Vienna. He was a Member of Sino-European Track Two Negotiations on Cybersecurity.
He was an Advisor to UN CTED, and a Co-Founder and President of the Tech against Terrorism Project (techagainstterrorism.org) pursuant to UN Security Council Resolutions.
He was a Board member of the Donors Association of the Zurich Film Festival (https://zff.com/en/home/)
Present Positions
President of Dr. Daniel Stauffacher + Partner (www.stauffacherconsulting.ch), Founder and President of the ICT4Peace Foundation, Switzerland (www.ict4peace.org), Founder and member of the Board of the Friends of ICT4Peace, United States and an Alumni of The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University Law School (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu) and the Geneva Center for Security Policy (GCSP) (https://www.gcsp.ch).
He is a Co-Founder and President of the Zurich Hub for Ethics and Technology (ZHET) project in 2016 (https://ethicsandtechnology.org).
He is a Member of the Honorary Committee of the Zurich Human Rights Film Festival (http://www.humanrightsfilmfestival.ch). He is a member of the Zurich Committee of Human Rights Watch and President of WE ARE AIA – AWARENESS IN ART in Zurich (https://www.weareaia.ch).
