In honour of Ambassador Henry Gill’s stellar professional service to the region, The University of the West Indies (UWI) has launched the Henry Gill Memorial Lecture series, with the first lecture to be delivered this Wednesday, March 17 by Pascal Lamy, the former World Trade Organization director general and European Union trade commissioner.

Ambassador Henry Steadman Gill (1942-2013) was an internationally respected Caribbean academic, international relations practitioner, and trade policy expert and negotiator. A national of Trinidad and Tobago, Ambassador Gill was a well-loved research fellow and lecturer at the Institute of International Relations at the UWI, St Augustine Campus, from 1974 to1983.

He later served as deputy permanent secretary of the Latin American and the Caribbean Economic System (SELA) from 1986-1990. At the end of his term, the president of Venezuela conferred on him the Order of the Liberator, Venezuela’s highest national award, for “service to the cause of Latin American and Caribbean unity” — the only SELA deputy to have been so honoured.

In 1999, Ambassador Gill joined the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery, now Caricom Office of Trade Negotiations, where he served as senior technical director from 2002 to 2008 and later as director general from 2008 to 2009.