The Commission at its 67th session (26-27 April 2017) elected its new Bureau, with Latvia as Chair; Switzerland and Belarus as Vice-Chairs.Ambassador Janis Karklins, currently is the Permanent Representative of Latvia to the United Nations in Geneva. He also has served as the Latvian Ambassador to France, Andorra, Monaco and UNESCO, the Director of the NATO Center of Excellence for Strategic Communications, as well as the Assistant Director General of Communication and Information of UNESCO.
During his first stay in Geneva he presided over the Preparatory Committee of the Tunis Phase of the World Summit on the Information Society. Currently he chairs the WIPO General Assembly.
Ambassador Karklins chaired the Governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN from 2007 until June 2010, at the same time being the GAC liaison to the ICANN Board of Directors. In 2014 the UN Secretary General appointed Ambassador Karklins to be the Chair of the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group of the Internet Governance Forum for two year term.
Ambassador Karklins holds an engineering degree from the Riga Technical University and attended an Executive Education Program for Eastern European diplomats at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.