Alan Donnelly

Alan was first elected to the European Parliament in 1989, representing the constituency of Tyne and Wear, re-elected to a second term in 1994 and finally elected to represent the North East of England in 1999. He was Leader of the Labour Party in Europe until his retirement from the EU Parliament in January 2000. Alan led the European Parliamentary Delegation to the special G7 summit on the development of the global information society, sharing the platform with the US Vice-President, Al Gore. In February 2000, Alan Donnelly became the Executive Chairman of his own company, Sovereign Strategy. Due to his extensive work in the sustainability, global health and development field, Alan has created a ‘G20 Global Health Partnership Initiative’, in consultation with international health stakeholders. The initiative included a lynchpin ‘G20 Global Health Innovation’ roundtable in Berlin on April 28th 2017 hosted by the co-sponsors. On the basis of the success to bring together key global health stakeholders from the public, academic and private space, Alan and the co-sponsor fundamentally contributed to bringing global health challenges on the G20 leader’s agenda and the G20 (2017) communiqué. Following an increasing interest to maintain and build the momentum of this initiative, Alan has created Sovereign Sustainability and Development (SSD) in late 2017 that act as the convener and secretariat of ‘The G20 Health and Development Partnership’. Alan has become the Executive Chairman of SSD and the Patron of the G20 Health and Development Partnership. Following consultation with a number of key stakeholders and confirmation from the Government of Argentina that health would remain a focus of the G20 under its Presidency (2018), a Working Session was scheduled in the UK Houses of Parliament in December 2017 in order to begin to collectively plot a course for the Partnership. For his work on German Unification, Alan was honored with the title, ‘Knight Commander of Germany’ from the German state in 1991.