The BMJ Appeal 2024-25: David Miliband on hospital attacks, Trump, and the International Rescue Committee in a “flammable world”
BMJ 2024; 387 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q2591 (Published 28 November 2024) Cite this as: BMJ 2024;387:q2591Donate now to The BMJ x IRC appeal 2024-25
- Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief,
- Mun-Keat Looi, international features editor
- The BMJ
Biography
David Miliband is president and chief executive officer of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), where he oversees the agency’s mission to help people affected by humanitarian crises to survive, recover, and rebuild their lives. The IRC now works in more than 40 countries affected by crisis and conflict and has refugee resettlement and assistance programmes in over 29 US cities, as well as in the UK and Europe.
From 2007 to 2010, Miliband was the 74th secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs of the United Kingdom, driving advancements in human rights and representing the UK throughout the world. In 2006, as secretary of state for the environment, he pioneered the world’s first legally binding emissions reduction requirements. He was the member of parliament for South Shields from 2001 to 2013.
What is the International Rescue Committee?
It was founded at the behest of Albert Einstein, who was a refugee in New York in the 1930s. He wrote these pained letters to Eleanor Roosevelt, then first lady, saying that there was an unspeakable trauma that was going to hit Europe and that persecuted minorities—Jews, intellectuals—needed haven in the United States. But the US did not open its doors in the 1930s, so Einstein, along with 50 of his friends, created the Emergency Rescue Committee—which became the International Rescue Committee—to help get people out of Nazi occupied Europe.
Our first employee worked in Marseille in Nazi occupied France. He issued fake passports to over 2000 people. People like Marc Chagall, the painter, escaped from Nazi death camps thanks to the Emergency Rescue Committee. Our mission today is to help people whose lives are shattered by conflict, …
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