Born: 1937

Jiri Dienstbier co-founded the newspaper that symbolized his country's Velvet Revolution, Lidové Noviny.

He was a foreign policy commentator for Czechoslovak Radio before Warsaw Pact forces invaded his country in 1968, after which he was forced to work as an archivist, a night watchman and a boiler attendant to make a living. From 1969 until the fall of the communist regime in 1989, he published underground, or samizdat, journals, and was among the first signatories of Charter 77, the human rights movement active in Czechoslovakia from 1977 to 1990. In 1988 he co-founded the country's leading underground newspaper, Lidové Noviny (People's News).

He was educated at Charles University in Prague, he worked with Czechoslovak Broadcasting from 1958 to 1969 as an editor, commentator and foreign correspondent in the Far East, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Dhe was expelled from the Journalists' Union in 1969 and dismissed from broadcasting in 1970.
In 1979 as a member of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS), he was arrested and imprisoned for three years along with Václav Havel and other VONS members. From 1969 to 1989, he published and edited clandestine samizdat journals, including Ctverec (The Square), a periodical on international politics, and wrote for the foreign press on domestic and, especially, foreign policy issues.

He was one of the prominent Czech intellectuals centered around the dissident group Charter 77, which called for greater civil and political freedoms and helped prepare the political changes that led to the end of 40 years of communist rule in 1989. The Charter 77 movement drew attention to human rights violations in Czechoslovakia and was a regular source of reports for Western news media.

In November 1989, when Czech opposition groups led by the Charter 77 movement formed a pro-democracy coalition called the Civic Forum, Dienstbier acted as the first spokesman of its coordinating center. Following mass demonstrations for greater freedom during the Velvet Revolution, the communist government stepped down and the new government began negotiating with the Civic Forum. In December Václav Havel, the Charter 77 leader, was elected the first non-communist head of state since 1948. Dienstbier was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs on Dec. 10, 1989, and acted as both Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia until 1992.

He was a co-founder and chairman of the editorial board of the paper that symbolized the Velvet Revolution, the samizdat monthly Lidové Noviny, which began publishing openly in January 1990, for the first three months twice a week and since April 1990 as a daily. He continues to be involved in the field of freedom of expression and information as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a post he has held since 1998.

Appointed as a Trustee on 13 October 2005.