BOWIE, MD, October 31, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Peter Harry Pfund with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Pfund retired in 1997 after working in the Office of the Legal Adviser (L) of the U.S. Department of State since 1959, with two assignments abroad. He began in 1959 as one of several attorneys working on the Department publication Whiteman: Digest of International Law. Subsequently he was in the part of L responsible for European and Canadian matters, including US-Canadian boundary waters.
1966 to 1968 Pfund was seconded to the Legal Division of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Thereafter he returned to the part of L counseling the Consular Affairs Bureau, working primarily on extradition to and from the United States. Pfund was posted to the U.S. embassy in Bonn, Germany as its legal adviser from 1973 to 1978, focused mainly on issues concerning the status and security of Berlin, as well as legal issues involving U.S. forces stationed in Germany.
From 1979 until his retirement from L in 1997, Pfund was Assistant Legal Adviser for Private International Law in L, responsible for U.S. participation in the private law unification and harmonization work of four intergovernmental organizations, including the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCOPIL). During that tenure, Pfund headed the U.S delegations to sessions of those organizations and the diplomatic conferences at which the final texts of treaties were negotiated and adopted, including the 1980 U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the 1980 Hague Convention on International (Parental) Child Abduction. The United States subsequently became a party to both Conventions. He was also responsible for U.S. participation in the negotiation and conclusion of the 1993 Hague Convention on the Intercountry Adoption of Children, designed primarily to protect the children involved in such adoptions and their biological parent(s). The United States became a party to the Convention in 2007. Pfund retired from L at 65 in 1997, but continued to work part-time until his final retirement in 2004 in the Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs on the provisions of federal regulations for the implementation of the Intercountry Adoption Convention by the United States.
Pfund is a graduate of Amherst College, cum laude (history), and of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is a member of the D.C. Bar, the American Bar Association (ABA), and the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, was on the Board of International Legal Materials and has been a member of the American Society of International Law. He helped to found the Bonn-based Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristen Vereinigung (German-American Lawyers Association) in 1975 and served on its Board of Directors from 1975 to 1978.. He was given the Secretary of State's Career Achievement Award upon his retirement from L in 1997. The ABA in 1987 awarded Pfund the Leonard J. Theberge Prize for Private International Law. In 2000 the National Council for Adoption conferred on Pfund its Adoption Hall of Fame Award.
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