EU Commissioner and Head of The World Trade Organisation
He was appointed to the European Commission in 1985 and had responsibility for competition policy and, initially for 1985 only, also for education. He has said that he was especially pleased to have proposed the establishment of the ERASMUS programme (European Regional Action Scheme for Mobility of University Students) that allows European University students to study in other member states.
He was Chairman of the Committee that produced The Sutherland Report on the completion of the Internal Market of the EEC, commissioned by the European Commission and presented to the European Council at its Edinburgh meeting in 1992.
He was the youngest ever European Commissioner and served in the first Delors Commission, where he played a crucial role in opening up competition across Europe, particularly the airline, telecoms, and energy sectors. Subsequently he was Director General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organisation). Later Mickey Kantor, the US Trade Minister, credited him with being the father of globalization and said that without him there would have been no WTO. The Uruguay round of global trade talks, concluded in December 1993 with Sutherland as chair of GATT, produced a "comprehensive, rules-based and global trade regime" which was the biggest trade agreement in history and established the World Trade Organisation.
Chairman of the Advisory Council to the Director General of the World Trade Organisation that produced the Report on the Future of the World Trade Organisation published in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Peter Sutherland
Famous quotes containing the words head, world, trade and/or organisation:
“Don’t want no money from you Ethan, no money, Marty. Just a roof over old Mose head and a rocking chair by the fire, my own rocking chair by the fire.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Teaching your child a trade is better than giving him a thousand ounces of gold.”
—Chinese proverb.
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)