Robert van Voren

He was born on 7 July 1959, Montreal,[3] Quebec, Canada[7] and graduated from Amsterdam University in 1986.[8] In the 1980s, he worked at the Bukovsky Foundation based in Amsterdam[9] and since 1989 was the director of its successor, the Second World Center.[10] Since 1980, he had regularly visited the Soviet Union including Ukraine and collected information on repression of dissidents,[11] as well as smuggling Samizdat publications to the west. In 1986, he became Chief Executive of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry.[11] He is also a Honorary Fellow of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists and Honorary Member of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association.[12] In 2005, he was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his work as a human rights activist.[12] He has a Lithuanian citizenship[13] since 11 February 2003[3] and lives in Vilnius.[14]

Robert van Voren has published over a dozen books.[8] His works cover political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union[15] and China[16] and reforms of mental health in Eastern Europe,[17] the former Soviet Union,[18] Ukraine,[19] Georgia.[20] Robert van Voren's contribution to reform of forensic psychiatry in states of the former Soviet Union is widely recognized.[21] Van Voren also published widely on the theme of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

In 2015, he commented the Ukrainian crisis and the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War.[22]

Van Voren wrote about his disappointment with the results of the Dutch referendum on the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement.[23]