John Noel Reedman
english-South African diplomat
John Noel Reedman (24 December 1905 – 20 May 1994) was an English-South African diplomat who was the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations in Palestine. He had previously served as Senior Economic Advisor both to UNSCOP and the Palestine Commission. Reedman was a professor of economics at Witwatersrand University in South Africa.
Life
John Noel Reedman was born on 24 December 1905 in Kirkburton, Yorkshire, England. He gained a PhD in economics from Sheffield University. Reedman moved to South Africa and became a lecturer of economics in the Department of Commerce at the University of Witwatersrand in 1936. He was described as an "outstanding teacher and scholar" who had "carried much of the lecturing burden of the department" He gave up his professorial functions in Johannesburg in January 1947 in order to join the staff of the United Nations.
Career
At the outset of his career with the United Nations, Reedman began his work on the issue of Palestine. Before the founding of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), the UN Secretariat began accumulating knowledge and expertise on Palestine in early 1947 after the British government announced that it was referring the Palestine problem to the United Nations. Reedman was part of a five-member team assembled at the direction of Secretary-General Trygve Lie to collect this information.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Noel Reedman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.