Swiss sociologist, UN rapporteur and fierce capitalism critic Jean Ziegler dies at 92

Jean Ziegler, the Swiss sociologist, author and former UN special rapporteur on the right to food, died in Geneva on 10 June 2026 at the age of 92. His wife confirmed the news to Swiss public broadcaster RTS, and politician Carlo Sommaruga, a friend of Ziegler, told ZEIT ONLINE that the cause was complications from Parkinson's disease.

Born Hans Ziegler in Thun on 19 April 1934 into a bourgeois Protestant family, he later described his upbringing as a "death by suffocation" from which he fled through travel and study. He read law in Switzerland before studying sociology in Paris and New York. A meeting with Che Guevara at a 1964 sugar conference in Geneva proved formative: Ziegler recounted that Guevara told him to fight "in the heart of the system, because that is where the brain of the monster is." Ziegler called this his strategy of "subversive integration" — using one's position inside the system to change it.

Political and academic career

Ziegler sat in Switzerland's National Council for the Social Democratic Party for a total of 27 years, between 1967 and 1999 with one four-year interruption. He chaired the parliamentary group Switzerland–Third World and taught sociology at the University of Geneva, later also lecturing at the universities of Bern, Grenoble and the Sorbonne in Paris. His circle included Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Controversial writings and legal battles

His breakthrough came in 1976 with "Eine Schweiz, über jeden Verdacht erhaben" (A Switzerland Above Suspicion), which accused large Swiss corporations of profiting at the expense of the world's poorest. In 1990 he portrayed his homeland as a financial hub for international crime in "Die Schweiz wäscht weißer" (Switzerland Washes Whiter). The 1997 book "Die Schweiz, das Gold und die Toten" (The Switzerland, the Gold and the Dead) exposed the entanglement of Swiss banks with the Nazi regime and their handling of Holocaust victims' dormant accounts. These works brought him international acclaim but also fierce domestic backlash; he was frequently branded a "Nestbeschmutzer" (one who fouls his own nest) and a traitor. Several defamation lawsuits cost him hundreds of thousands of francs.

UN work and global advocacy

From 2000 to 2008 Ziegler served as UN special rapporteur on the right to food. He later sat on the advisory committee of the Human Rights Council. In that role he condemned the production of biofuels in developing countries at the expense of food crops, demanded a right to remain for hunger refugees in wealthy nations, and called for a binding code of conduct for transnational corporations. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk paid tribute on Wednesday, calling Ziegler a "champion for the human rights ecosystem and an extremely strong personality" who fought "above all for vulnerable populations."

We all grew up with him.

Ambivalent legacy

Ziegler's record also contains positions he later regretted. He long defended Pol Pot, whose 1970s agrarian Marxist regime in Cambodia caused millions of deaths. In 1989 he advised Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, a move he described in old age as a mistake. He also applauded Venezuela's populist president Hugo Chávez and never criticised Cuba. His final book, published in German in 2019, asked "Where is hope?" — an appeal for resistance against war, famine and inequality. He remained a convinced Marxist to the end, calling neoliberal capitalism "the source of all the world's misfortunes" and a system he considered unreformable because it rests on "a total absence of public, parliamentary or state control."