Adriaan Pelt

Who was Adriaan Pelt?

Adriaan Pelt was a Dutch journalist, international civil servant and diplomat, most famous for drafting the post war constitution of Libya

As a reporter for the newspaper De Telegraaf he lived during the First World War in London and Paris. There he studied diplomacy at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. He married a Frenchwoman.

From 1920 to 1940 he worked as an adviser to the League of Nations and from 1934 as head of information. He visited many of the inter-war trouble spots in the world, such as Manchuria and India.

During the Second World War he was head of the Government Press Office, later Netherlands Government Information Service, in London. There he founded the Anep Aneta-on, the free counterpart to the Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau in the occupied territories. He started radio Orange Brandaris broadcasting Dutch programs to the occupied territories using English channels. And he also helped monitor the Dutch Radio news.

In 1945 he went San Francisco with the Dutch delegation to help draft the United Nations Charter.