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Gist: Peter Denis Sutherland, Honorary KCMG (born 25 April 1946) is an international businessman and former Attorney General of Ireland, associated with the Fine Gael party (part of the Christian Democrat bloc). He is a barrister by profession, and is also Senior Counsel at the Irish Bar. He is also known for serving in a variety of business and political roles.
Son of the late William "Billy" Sutherland, an insurance broker, Peter Sutherland was educated at Gonzaga College, a Jesuit day school in Dublin and then studied law at University College Dublin. He played prop forward for the UCD rugby team and was club captain, a role he later filled at Landsdowne Football Club, before retiring from the sport in his mid-20s. He remains an active member of Lansdowne F.C.
After UCD, he studied at the King's Inns in Dublin and was called to the Bar in 1969 and practiced until 1981 when, aged 34, he was the youngest Attorney General of Ireland. He served under two Governments led by Garret FitzGerald. He also advised the FitzGerald government on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland which introduced a constitutional ban on abortion, though Sutherland opposed the wording on grounds that it was ambiguous and unclear.
He was appointed to the European Commission in 1985 and had responsibility for competition policy and, later, also for education. He has said that he was especially pleased to have helped to establish 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 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 1994 with Sutherland as chair of Gatt, produced the biggest trade agreement in history and established the World Trade Organisation.
He is currently serving as Chairman of both BP and Goldman Sachs International (a registered UK broker-dealer, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs) and is a non-executive director of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. He has formerly served on the board of ABB.
He is on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group , a chairman of the Trilateral Commission
He is a member of the Comite d'Honneur of the Institute of European Affairs, and an Honorary President of the European Movement Ireland.[[]
(centre) and Will Hutton (right), at the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin in 2006.]]
He was appointed as a member of the Hong Kong Chief Executive's Council of International Advisers in the years of 1998?2005.[[]
He is President of the Federal Trust for Education and Research, a British think tank. He is Chairman of The Ireland Fund of Great Britain, part of The Ireland Funds. He is a member of the advisory council of Business for New Europe, a British pro-European think-tank.[[]
In 2005, he was appointed as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.[[ In Spring 2006 he was appointed Chair of London School of Economics Council commencing in 2008.][[]
Peter Sutherland also serves on the International Advisory Board of IESE,[[ the eminent graduate business school of the prestigious Spanish university, the University of Navarra. ]
In January 2006, he was appointed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan as his Special Representative for Migration. In this position, he was responsible for promoting the establishment of a Global Forum on Migration and Development, a state-led effort open to all UN members that is meant to help governments better understand how migration can benefit their development goals. The Global Forum was acclaimed by UN Member States at the UN High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, in September 2006, and will be launched in Brussels in July 2007.
On 5 December 2006, he was appointed as Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (a financial adviser to the Vatican).
On 22 January 2010 he said while in Dublin that Ireland should have fewer universities.
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