Guest Lecture
LouvainMUN is honored to announce that our guest speaker for the closing ceremony will be the inspiring Belgian diplomat and professor at UCLouvain, His Excellence Mister Raoul Delcorde.
Guest Speaker
His diplomatic career begins after he was admitted at the Belgian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, with a first assignment as 1st Secretary and Deputy chief of mission at the Belgian embassy in Islamabad, in 1986. The Belgian permanent representation to the UN in New York was Mr. Delcorde’s next destination, where Belgium was spearheading the effort for humanitarian intervention following the end of the Cold War era. The subsequent years saw him representing Belgium at the OSCE and then moving to the Belgian embassy in Washington during the Clinton's presidency, with the rank of minister-counselor in charge of economic affairs.
After that, he returned to the headquarters in order to organize the Belgian presidency of the EU in 2001.Mr. Delcorde was soon appointed Ambassador in Sweden, followed by a brief stop in Brussels, before becoming Ambassador to Poland and then to Canada. Throughout his diplomatic career, he has remained close to UCLouvain, either as a Ph.D student or a visiting professor. His doctorate thesis was defended at our university in 1993. Today, Mr Delcorde alternates between the diplomatic corps, his lectures about the European Union and being a writer, publishing books about the diplomatic profession in Belgium. For that matter, he published an opinion in La Libre about the evolution of the diplomacy work which you can find here.