Alain Destexhe is the first deputy chairman of the Belgian Senate’s Committee of Foreign Affairs. He trained as a physician before completing graduate studies at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. In the early 1990s, he was secretary-general of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and later was president of the International Crisis Group in Brussels. He has published extensively on international humanitarian issues—including his book Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century (1995)—and has served as an international observer during several elections in Asia, Central America, and Europe. He was initiator and then secretary of the Belgian Senate Special Committee of Inquiry into the Genocide in Rwanda.