Heidi Tagliavini

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Heidi Tagliavini (born 1950) is a Swiss former diplomat known for her work in international aid and peacekeeping. A 2003 profile called her “Switzerland’s outstanding diplomat.” She led the European Union inquiry into the causes of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War and later represented the OSCE in the 2015 Minsk II negotiations over the war in Donbas.

She was born in Basel and joined the Swiss diplomatic service in 1982. She worked in the Foreign Affairs Directorate and was posted to The Hague. She was part of the first OSCE Assistance Group to Chechnya in 1995, served as Minister and Deputy Head of Mission at the Swiss embassy in Moscow in 1996, and was Deputy Head of UNOMIG in Georgia from 1998 to 1999. Returning to Switzerland in 1999, she led Human Rights and Humanitarian Policy in the Foreign Affairs Department. She then served as Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office for the Caucasus (2000–2001) and as Swiss Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina (2001–2002). At the request of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, she headed UNOMIG from 2002 to 2006, after which she became deputy head of the Directorate of Political Affairs in Bern.

In November 2008, the Swiss government supported the EU presidency’s request for Tagliavini to lead an independent fact-finding mission into the 2008 war in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with a budget of €1.6 million. The report, published 30 September 2009, concluded that Georgia started the war, but both sides escalated the conflict.

Until June 2015 she was a member of the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, alongside Ukraine’s Leonid Kuchma and Russia’s Mikhail Zurabov. She led the OSCE Election Observation Mission during Ukraine’s 2010 presidential elections and represented the OSCE in 2014–2015 negotiations over the Ukraine crisis, including Minsk II. After the 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 disaster, she helped secure access for international investigators to the area.

Tagliavini signed Minsk II in February 2015. She left the Swiss diplomatic service later that year. She co-authored The Caucasus – Defence of the Future (2001) about Chechnya and is an amateur photographer, also publishing Zeichen der Zerstörung, a book of her photographs from Chechnya.