Robert Fowler
During his 38 year Public Service career, Bob Fowler was the Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Ministers Trudeau, Turner and Mulroney, Deputy Minister of National Defence, Canada’s longest serving Ambassador to the United Nations (where he represented Canada on the Security Council in 1999 and 2000 and issued 2 ground-breaking reports on sanctions-busting in Angola, which cut off UNITA’s access to the arms bazaar and led to the end of the civil war which had ravished Angola for 25 years).
He was Ambassador to Italy and the 3 Rome-Based UN Food Agencies, Sherpa for the Kananaskis G8 Summit (for which he chaired the creation of the Africa Action Plan), and the Personal Representative for Africa of Prime Ministers Chrétien, Martin and Harper. Mr. Fowler retired from the Federal Public Service in the fall of 2006, and is now a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
In July 2008, The Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, appointed Mr. Fowler to be his Special Envoy to Niger, with the rank of Under-Secretary-General in the Secretariat of the UN. While acquitting his UN mission, Mr. Fowler and his colleague, Louis Guay, were captured by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) on 14 December 2008, and held hostage in the Sahara Desert for 130 days.
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