Francesco Paolo Fulci - Career

Career

Before leaving Italy's foreign service, Ambassador Fulci was Permanent Representative of Italy to the United Nations (1993–1999). In 1999, he became President of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), after serving as its Vice-President a year earlier. In 1997, he was elected to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. During his tenure as Italian Ambassador to the United Nations (extended by the Italian Government for two more years after his retirement age), Ambassador Fulci served twice as President of the Security Council.

At the UN, he co-founded, with the Ambassadors of Egypt, Mexico and Pakistan, the so-called "Coffee Club," a powerful lobby of countries formed in the early 1990s to oppose the expansion of the permanent membership of the Security Council, and push for the enlargement of non-permanent seats. In 1998 Ambassador Fulci masterminded the procedural resolution, introduced by the "Coffee Club" and approved by the General Assembly, which states that any resolution or decision on the reform of the Security Council, at all stages of the reform process, has to be adopted with a majority of two thirds of the UN member States. The "Coffee Club" was recently revived by Italy and Pakistan under the name of "Uniting for Consensus" to block a renewed bid by Germany, India, Japan, and Brazil to obtain a permanent seat in the Council.

In his capacity as President of the Economic and Social Council, Ambassador Fulci underlined in a "Manifesto on Poverty Eradication" ten priorities: they were later enshrined in the UN Millennium Declaration and in the UN Millennium Development Goals, adopted in September 2000, as well as in the "Monterrey Consensus" of 2002, at the end of the International Conference on Financing for Development.

A career diplomat, Ambassador Fulci served as Secretary-General of Italy's Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security from 1991 until 1993. From 1985 to 1991, he was Italy's Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels. From 1980 to 1985, Ambassador Fulci served as Italy's Ambassador to Canada. From 1976 to 1980, he was Chief of Staff to the Speaker of the Italian Senate, Amintore Fanfani.

During his long diplomatic career, Ambassador Fulci served his country in other important world capitals, including Tokyo, Paris, and Moscow. He entered the Italian foreign service in 1956.

Ambassador Fulci is Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy and Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

He graduated with honours in law in 1953 from the University of Messina and obtained a Master's degree in comparative law at Columbia University, New York, where he studied as a Fulbright scholar from 1954 to 1955. He later received the diploma from the Hague Academy of International Law, and attended the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, from 1955 to 1956, earning a Certificate of Advanced European Studies.