Jean Ziegler (born April 19, 1934) is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and a senior professor of sociology at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne, Paris. He was a Member of Parliament for the Social Democrats in the Swiss federal parliament from 1981 to 1999, now he is one of the biggest protagonists of the alter-globalization movement.

He gained international acclaim for his efforts on behalf of Jewish holocaust suvivors seeking compensation from bank accounts alleged linked to Nazi German in Swiss Banks. This work is documented in his book “The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine” published in 1998. (New York Times, Peter Grose, April 5, 1998).

In 2000, he was appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In this role, he has visited many countries on behalf of the Commission on Human Rights, including Niger, Ethiopia, India, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Brazil, Guatemala, and the Palestinian territories to report on the situation of hunger and malnutrition in these countries.

Jean Ziegler is the author of various books on globalization and on what he calls the crimes committed in the name of global finance and capitalism, condemning in particular the alleged role of Switzerland in these. He writes in French and German.

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