The Office of the President

Mirjana Spoljaric Egger has served as president of the ICRC since October 2022.

Between 2018 and 2022, Ms Spoljaric served as the United Nations (UN) assistant secretary-general, assistant administrator of the UN Development Programme and director of the regional bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Ms Spoljaric previously had many years of distinguished service with the Swiss diplomatic corps. More recently, she served as ambassador and head of the Swiss foreign affairs department’s division for the UN and other international organizations, where she was instrumental in shaping coherent Swiss policies and priorities in the main UN organs and conferences and representing Switzerland in multilateral processes. She also had responsibility for International Geneva and Switzerland's host country policy.

Ms Spoljaric served in several assignments in the Swiss foreign affairs department in Bern and was counsellor and head of the political team at the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the UN in New York.

From 2010 to 2012, Ms Spoljaric was seconded to the Office of the Commissioner-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East as senior adviser; her remit included organizational development, management reforms and external relations.

Earlier in her career, Ms Spoljaric worked in the Swiss embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and was desk officer at the Foreign Economic Affairs Directorate (International Finance Institutions) of the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs.

Ms Spoljaric studied philosophy, economics and international law at the Universities of Basel and Geneva and holds a master's degree. From 2004 to 2006 she was part-time lecturer on global governance at the University of Lucerne.

Ms Spoljaric speaks fluent English, French, German and Croatian. She is married and has a son and a daughter.

Gilles Carbonnier was elected to the ICRC Assembly in 2017 and has been vice-president of the ICRC since April 2018. Born in 1965, he holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Neuchâtel and has worked in three main fields over the past 30 years: development economics, humanitarian action and international trade.

Since 2007, Mr Carbonnier has been a professor of development economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, where he also served as director of studies and president of the Centre for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action. His expertise is in international cooperation, the economic dynamics of armed conflict, and the nexus between natural resources and development. His most recent book, published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2016, is Humanitarian Economics: War, Disaster and the Global Aid Market.

Prior to joining the Graduate Institute, Mr Carbonnier spent several years with the ICRC: he worked in the field from 1989 to 1991 as head of subdelegation in Ethiopia and Iraq and as a delegate in Sri Lanka and El Salvador, then at headquarters from 1999 to 2006 as an economic adviser. He was on the board of directors for Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland from 2007 to 2012.

Between 1992 and 1996, he was in charge of international trade negotiations (related to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization) and development cooperation programmes for the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs.