Tony deBrum

Tony de Brum (also deBrum; born 26 February 1945 on Tuvalu; † 22 August 2017 in Majuro) was a politician of the Marshall Islands. From March 2014 to January 2016 he was Minister of Foreign Affairs of this small island nation in the Pacific.

De Brum spent his childhood, youth, and adolescence in the Marshall Islands when they were under U.S. administration and used as a nuclear weapons test site. He studied at the University of Hawaii, where he contributed to a Marshallese-English dictionary published in 1976.

After the US granted self-government to the Marshall Islands in 1979, de Brum served as the first foreign minister of the not yet fully sovereign republic until 1987. For the second time, de Brum took over the Foreign Office in early 2008, when he was called by the newly elected President Litokwa Tomeing to his cabinet. He was dismissed by Tomeing in late February 2009 and replaced by John Silk. De Brum took a confrontational stance toward the U.S. - which funds much of the Marshall Islands' national budget - and had openly criticized the president on the issue. De Brum returned to government after the election of Christopher Loeak in early 2012. Loeak made him Minister in Assistance to the President, with duties equivalent to those of a vice president. On March 17, 2014, de Brum became the Marshall Islands' foreign minister for the third time.

Key issues for de Brum's political work have been climate change, from which the Marshall Islands are particularly vulnerable due to sea-level rise, and nuclear disarmament. Commenting on a lawsuit filed in April 2014 in the International Court of Justice against eight nuclear powers, de Brum stated, "Our people have suffered the catastrophic and irreparable harm of these weapons, and we vow to continue to fight so that no one else on earth ever experiences these atrocities." Along with the people of the Marshall Islands, de Brum was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, known as the "alternative Nobel Prize," in 2015 "in recognition of their vision and courage to use legal means to take action against nuclear powers for failing to meet their disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty." That same year, he received the Nuclear-Free Future Award in the Solutions category.

At the UN climate conference in Paris in mid-December 2015, he succeeded in forming a coalition ('High Ambition Coalition') between developing and industrialised countries. This was instrumental in ensuring that the climate conference ended successfully with the Paris Agreement.

Other

Tony de Brum was also a member of the Marshall Islands Parliament (Nitijeļā), he was last elected in 2011 as one of Kwajalein's representatives. He was not re-elected in December 2015.