Princess Christina of Sweden; Nina Lagergren, sister of Raoul Wallenberg and Honorary Member of The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation; Jacob Wallenberg, Vice-Chairman of Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse; Staffan Carlsson, Ambassador of Sweden and Gabor Klaniczay, Rector of Collegium Budapest unveiled a memorial plaque at the new Raoul Wallenberg Guesthouse of Collegium Budapest. The unveiling ceremony, followed by the ”Raoul Wallenberg Seminar on Human Rights”, is part of the tenth anniversary celebration of the existence of Collegium Budapest.
”Through this donation the Wallenberg foundations want to honour the courage, integrity and high moral standards of Raoul Wallenberg, and pay tribute to his unselfish and persistent work to save thousands of Jews during the Holocaust in Budapest in the winter of 1944-45.”, said Jacob Wallenberg, chairman of Skandinavska Enskilda Banken and Vice-Chairman of Knut och Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
The ”Raoul Wallenberg Seminar on Human Rights”, organized by Collegium Budapest, and supported by Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation tackled such burning issues as the ”Human rights of minorities in Europe”, ”Human rights and the EU enlargement”, different approaches of anti-discrimination legislation on national minorities, and examined the role of various institutions, such as the UN, the Council of urope and the OSCE. Speakers were: Max van der Stoel, the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities; Daniel Tarschys, former Secretary General of the Council of Europe: Goran Melander, Chairman of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund; and others. A new research project of Collegium Budapest, ”Jews in modern Europe” was also introduced during the seminar on 7/8 May 2001.
An International Wallenberg Conference was held in Berlin, May 14-15, 2001, organized by Collegium Hungaricum Berlin and Raoul Wallenberg Foundation Budapest. At this occasion a Raoul Wallenberg Exhibition was opened by Gergely Prohle, Ambassador of Hungary, Peter Bajtay, Curator of the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation Budapest and Dr. Andras Masat, director of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. The speakers of the conference involved Jan Lundvik, former ambassador of Sweden in Budapest, member of the Swedish-Russian working group to investigate the fate of Raoul Wallenberg and Maria Ember, author the book ”Wallenberg in Budapest”, Curator of the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation Budapest. Other lecturers were: Christopher Gann (Germany), S. Berger (USA), U. Volklein (Germany) and Lev Besymenski (Russia).
It was the first international conference held in Berlin on the Raoul Wallenberg henomenon.
