Die Vereinten Nationen in Bonn

The United Nations in Bonn
13
Bild Einweihung des UN Campus Bonn, 11. Juli 2006
Image Inauguration of UN Campus Bonn, July 11, 2006
II. BUILDING ON THE FUTURE
A functional United Nations building designed by a star architect.
A big river serenely flowing past the office tower in which
UN staff from around the globe work to make our world a better
place.
Thinking of New York and the East River Think again! The UN
Campus and its iconic Langer Eugen high-rise building are located
on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn, Germany. The building was
created by Egon Eiermann rather than Le Corbusier. Everything
here is considerably smaller than in New York. And yet this is a
success story, states Harald Ganns. The former Ambassador, now
the City of Bonn’s Senior Advisor on the United Nations, has been
working to establish Bonn as a center of international organizations
since 1995 and probably knows the story better than anyone
else. “When the German government moved to Berlin in 1999
there were a few dozen UN staff members based in Bonn. Today
there are some 1,000 working here,” Ganns notes.
In fact, the UN presence in Bonn predates the German Bundestag’s
decision to relocate Parliament and parts of the Federal
Government to Berlin, which was taken in 1999, by several decades.
In 1951, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) opened a liaison office in the recently established
capital of West Germany. The International Labour Organization
(ILO) followed suit two years later. But these offices, whose stuccoed
villas in a leafy neighborhood of Bonn’s southernmost district
of Bad Godesberg have long since found new occupants,
were small and merely representations of their respective organizations
to the German government, no different from those
found in other capitals the world over.
In 1984, however, the United Nations set up a totally different
kind of office on the banks of the Rhine when the Secretariat of
the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) took up its work in
Bonn. The Convention was one of the earliest multilateral
© UNV