Adam Daniel Rotfeld is a Polish researcher, diplomat, and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland from 5 January 2005 until 31 October 2005 when a change of government took place. He served earlier as the deputy foreign minister. While in that position, Rotfeld established the Warsaw Reflection Group on the UN Reform and the Transformation of the Euro-Atlantic Security Institutions, with participation from leading US and European experts and politicians. From 1991 up to 2002 he served as Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and in 1989–1991 project leader on Building a Cooperative Security System in and for Europe at SIPRI.
Life
Rotfeld was born in Przemyślany near Lwów, Poland. He survived the Holocaust in the Univ Lavra, a monastery of the Studite Brethren. During the war he was among people who received the Paraguayan citizenship certificate issued by Ładoś Group. Rotfeld was married to Barbara Sikorska-Rotfeld and has one daughter, Alicja, born in 1971. Rotfeld studied international law and diplomacy in Warsaw. He wrote his PhD dissertation on the right of self-determination of people in modern international law at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków which he defended in 1969. Later, habilitation on European Security in Statu Nascendi. He was appointed professor at Warsaw University by the President of Poland in 2001.
Professional activities
From 1961, Rotfeld worked as a researcher at the Polish Institute of International Affairs. He was a member of the UN Secretary General Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters from 2006 to 2011, and its chair in 2008; member of the NATO Expert Group on the New Strategic Concept of Alliance, and since 2010 Commissioner of the Euro-Atlantic Security Commission, member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. After 1989, he has served as leader of the Project on Building a Co–operative Security System in and for Europe at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He was appointed as Director of SIPRI from 1 July 1991 and re–elected in 1996 for a second term, lasting until June 2002. He is a member of many consultative bodies and scientific councils, including the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is co-chairman of Polish-Russian Group on Difficult Matters. He has participated in many multilateral negotiations and conferences on security and arms control.
Publications
Rotfeld has published and edited more than 20 monographs and over 400 articles. His work initially focused on the legal and political aspect of relations between Germany and Central and East European states after World War II and multilateral process of security and cooperation in Europe initiated by the Helsinki Accords, as well as arms control and non-proliferation. After the end of the cold war he co-edited the volume Germany and Europe in Transition with Walther Stützle. Since then his publications have mainly focused on human rights, cooperative security, CSBMs, multilateral security structures and the political and legal structures of the security system in Europe. He was editor of the SIPRI Yearbook: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security from 1991 to 2002. He has written more than 20 chapters on global and regional security systems and European and transatlantic security structures for the SIPRI Yearbook. He initiated the Warsaw Reflection Group and chaired the series of reports on the UN reform, multilateral European security institutions and on arms control, non-proliferation and denuclearization.
Appointments
In his capacity as Director of SIPRI, he was appointed in 1992 as Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office to elaborate the political settlement of the conflict in the Trans–Dniester region of Moldova; the recommended basic principles for the political solution of the conflict in his report were approved by the OSCE Council of Ministers and conflicting parties. Since 2001 he has been a member of the President of Poland's National Security Council. He became Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in November 2001; in June 2003 he was appointed Secretary of State and served as Minister of Foreign Affairs between January 2005 and November 2005. Since 2006 he has been a member of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Since 2008, former Foreign Minister Rotfeld has been Co-Chairing the Polish-Russian Group For Difficult Issues, in particular the Katyn massacre, together with Rector of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Anatoly V. Torkunov.
