Anders Kompass

Per Anders Gunnar Kompass (born 25 August 1955) is a Swedish diplomat and former UN official. He worked as the field operations director at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) between 2009 and 2016.

Career

Early career Kompass career began in 1983 when he was appointed first secretary at the Swedish Embassy in Mexico City. In this role, he was responsible for humanitarian aid in Central America and also served as chargé d'affaires in El Salvador. Three years later, in 1986, he returned to Sweden as a desk officer at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm, where he oversaw development cooperation with Latin America. By 1990, he was working in the Political Department of the foreign ministry, focusing on Latin American affairs.

United Nations In 1992, Kompass transitioned to the United Nations, becoming head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in El Salvador and Belize. He returned to Sweden in 1996 to take up the role of Ambassador for Migration Issues at the foreign ministry in Stockholm. The following year, in 1997, he was appointed Director at the Americas Department of the foreign ministry, further solidifying his expertise in Latin American affairs. Prince Zeid then proposed to dismantle the field operations unit of the OHCHR, which effectively would have removed Kompass' position from the organization. Meanwhile, the United States and other member states criticized the UN leadership for seeming to spend more efforts on discrediting Kompass for disclosing the sexual abuses rather than on holding the abusers themselves accountable for their crimes.

On 22 June 2015, after much criticism in the media, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed an independent panel to investigate the matter. The UN panel cleared Anders Kompass from any wrongdoing and concluded that he did indeed have the authority to share the information in the report with the French authorities. The panel also found that the concerns of risks to the victims by including their identities in the report had been largely exaggerated.

Later career After nearly two decades with the UN, Kompass returned to Sweden in 2016 to serve as a Senior Advisor at the foreign ministry in Stockholm.

Personal life On 25 February 1985, Kompass became engaged to Carmen Bascon in La Paz, Bolivia. He later married Flaminia Minelli (born 1971), a UN official from Italy. He has one son from a previous marriage.

Awards and decorations Stig Dagerman Prize (2017) Grand Cross of the Order of José de Marcoleta (3 September 2020)