Ambassador Rytis Paulauskas is the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Lithuania to the United Nations since May 2021. Prior to his appointment to the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Lithuania to the United Nations, Mr. Paulauskas served as Director of Information and Public Relations Department of his country’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 2016 to 2021. He was Permanent Representative of the Republic of Lithuania to the UN and other International Organizations in Geneva between 2012 and 2016. Amb. Paulauskas graduated from the Vilnius University with a law degree, had training courses at the Academy of International Law, The Hague, Netherlands and completed a joint master’s program at the Tuft University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard University’s J. F. Kennedy Government School.

Richard Gowan is currently UN director at the International Crisis Group, and was previously research director at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. He has taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Stanford in New York, and wrote a weekly column on multilateralism (“Diplomatic Fallout”) for World Politics Review from 2013-2019. He has acted as a consultant to the UN on peacekeeping, political affairs, and migration. He is an associate fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.