Éliane Duthoit

Éliane Duthoit (born 1946 in Brittany), a French citizen, is a senior United Nations official at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Career overview

Since the early 1990s, Duthoit was appointed successively Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator in Ingushetia (covering Chechnya), and then head of the OCHA offices in Uganda, Timor-Leste, Nepal, Southern Sudan, and latterly Chad. Between these appointments, she carried out short assignments with other functions in Burundi and elsewhere.

Specific achievements

In Uganda, Éliane Duthoit played an important role in attracting international attention to what the United Nations believed was a forgotten humanitarian crisis.

In Chechnya, she played an important role in facilitating negotiations between the Russian military and Chechen rebels to ensure humanitarian relief for internally displaced persons (IDPs).

In 2006, she was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan as head of the OCHA office in Juba, Southern Sudan, under the leadership of Under-Secretary-General Jan Egeland. This was when humanitarian needs were gradually leading the way to development, in which OCHA along with other United Nations agencies reportedly played an important role. In Southern Sudan, she also played a significant role, in facilitating negotiations at the 2006-2007 Juba talks between the Government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), hosted and mediated by the Government of Southern Sudan with United Nations support in the person of Joaquim Chissano as Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for LRA-affected areas.

In August 2007, with increasing humanitarian needs in Chad, she was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as head of the OCHA office in Chad, based in the capital N'Djamena. In February 2008 when armed fighting erupted in N'Djamena, she stayed behind as part of a United Nations skeleton team