People in the news

Eric Schwartz

Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration (since June 2009)

(State.gov)

Read more

Background

At a Glance

Career History: Executive Director, Connect U.S. Fund (2007 to 2009); Deputy Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, United Nations (2005)
Birthday: August 9, 1957
Hometown: Syosset, NY

Alma Mater: SUNY Binghampton, B.A., 1979, Princeton University, MPA, 1985, New York University School of Law, J.D., 1985
Spouse: Cathy Graham
Web site

Path to Power

Schwartz grew up in Syosset, N.Y. He graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he studied political science, in 1979. "I was always committed to a career in public service," Schwartz said. "I grew up in an environment where public service was what I expected I'd be doing."

After graduation, Schwartz interned for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace along with Jeff Merkley, now a Democratic senator from Oregon. At the end of their term, the pair decided to back pack and bus through Central America. They agreed to speak only Spanish and to sit separately so they could talk to natives.

Read more

Schwartz then moved to New Jersey, where he pursued a master's in Public Affairs in international relations at Princeton. He earned his J.D. at the New York University School of Law in 1985.

After leaving school, Schwartz became the Washington director for Asia Watch, a human rights group that reported on abuses across the continent. He left that position in 1989 to work for the House Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs.

In 1993, Schwartz joined the Clinton administration as a staff member on the National Security Council. There, he worked on a range of humanitarian and refugee issues, including the rescue of Kurdish families in Iraq and the U.S. relief efforts in Central America and Kosovo. He also addressed human rights and rule of law issues and played a key role in the White House decision to sign on to the International Criminal Court treaty.

Schwartz left his position in 2001 and was named a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by Congress. He researched refugee policy and humanitarian issues and also worked as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

In 2003, he joined the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

After a tsunami devastated some of central and south Asia in 2004, Schwartz was named deputy special envoy for tsunami recovery by the United Nations. In that position, he helped envoy Bill Clinton coordinate donations and oversee implementation of aid programs. Schwartz said of his work in Asia that "you're struck by two things. Number one, the amount of devastation that people are forced to endure and secondly, the capacity of people, not only to endure, but really to persevere and to thrive under the most extraordinarily difficult of circumstances."

In 2007, Schwartz returned to the nonprofit world as executive director of Connect U.S. Fund, a foundation/NGO collaboration that promotes responsible U.S. engagement throughout the world. He was tapped by the Obama administration to lead the U.N. review team during the 2008 transition. Schwartz was also a member of the national security policy working group.

Schwartz was nominated in April 2009 to serve as assistant secretary for population, refugees and migration in April 2009. He was confirmed in June 2009. Already, he has been confronted with several crises. In July 2009, Schwartz released $8 million to help quickly resettle more than 280,000 Sri Lankans who were driven from their homes during a civil war.

The Issues

Schwartz has long been an advocate of proactive U.S. engagement with the rest of the world. Obama, Schwartz said, should affirm his commitment to addressing such international problems as climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. In an essay about the importance of the 2008 election, he wrote "we also must appreciate that a superpower that continually walks away from broad international consensus on key issues cannot long sustain a position of leadership."

Given his prior work on the International Criminal Court, Schwartz received some right-wing criticism during the transition - when he ran the Obama UN transition. "Schwartz and his associates are clearly laying the groundwork for the Obama Administration's acceptance of and membership in the ICC," wrote Cliff Kincaid in 2009.

Read more

Refugees

There are almost 42 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world, according to the United Nations. Millions of others are from countries in which the State Department has invested heavily. Millions of Iraqis and Afghans have been displaced.

Schwartz pledged to be an advocate for these people. "Part of my job is to help to keep the focus on how policies impact those who are most disenfranchised," Schwartz said. He plans on making the case that how we address humanitarian issues affects national security in several ways. If we deal effectively with displaced populations, we are helping to promote stability in countries that can often be of critical interest in the United States.

At his confirmation hearings, Schwartz pledged to develop more effective and sustainable humanitarian strategies for dealing with refugees, especially the men and women who have become refugees for protracted periods. More than 8 million people worldwide have been displaced for more than a decade, according to the United Nations. "U.S. humanitarian assistance efforts [should] help to create the conditions for longer term, sustainable recovery," he said at his 2009 confirmation hearings.

To do this, Schwartz advocates working "intensively" with countries of origin (and in some cases, asylum countries) to create and fund plans to resettle refugees who have been displaced for years.

Some refugee organizations say the U.S. government has not drafted a coherent policy on its approach to dealing with refugees and strategies for reducing statelessness.

Schwartz has also urged that particular attention be paid to the address problems faced by female refugees. He has called for greater protection for women in the camps, who are often victims of sex crimes and violence, and more accountability for the military forces that are supposed to fight violence in the camps.

Reforming the United Nations

In 2004, Schwartz serve das a "lead expert" on a task force on reforming the United Nations' human rights efforts. After a year of study, the task force said the U.N. has not been forceful enough in opposing genocide. The U.N. should "affirm a responsibility of every sovereign government to protect its own citizenry from genocide, mass killings and massive and sustained human rights violations," the committee's report said. The U.S. should also be an advocate for this agenda and support halting the genocide in Darfur and Sudan, the committee wrote.

The task force also proposed several changes to the U.N. structure, including establishing a single, senior official in charge of daily operations; empowering the Secretary General to replace his or her top officials when he or she is appointed and increasing support for development work in third world countries.

The Network

Schwartz has ties to several Clinton-era national security experts, including Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser from 1997 to 2000. He is also close to President Bill Clinton, with whom he served as a U.N. special envoy after the 2005 tsunami ravaged Southeast Asia and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. And he is close to both Susan Rice and Samantha Power, both key foreign policy advisers to President Obama.

On the Congressionally mandated panel on UN reform, Schwartz served with current State Department official Anne Marie Slaughter, head of the Office of Policy Planning. In his new gig, Schwartz will work for Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero.

Read more

Additional Resources