THE international body's chairman, former US Senator and federal judge, George John Mitchell, (62), brings a wealth of political and legal experience to the work.
His background is Irish American. His mother died when he was very young and he was placed for adoption with an Irish American father and a Lebanese mother. His early circumstances were modest his adoptive father was a college janitor and his mother worked the midnight shift in woollen mills for nearly 30 years.
Educated at Bowdoin College, Maine, he served with US army counter intelligence in Berlin in the mid 1950s. He worked his way through law school, graduating from the Georgetown University law centre in Washington DC in 1960.
By now an active member of the Democratic Party, he became executive assistant to Senator Edmund Muskie in 1962. By 1966 he had become Democratic Party chairman in Maine.
In 1980 he was appointed to the US Senate when Muskie became Secretary of State. He held his seat at the next election and became Senate Majority leader in 1988, an extremely powerful position. The passage of the Clear Air Bill, which took him 10 years, best shows his patience and tenacity.
He was initially opposed to the Gulf, War and nearly gathered a Senate majority against it, but he supported the war effort once hostilities began.
He became one of President Clinton's closest allies and friends on Capitol Hill until he retired from the Senate in December 1994, a decision which had surprised many when he announced it eight months earlier.
During his time in the Senate he was associated with the Congressional Friends of Ireland and in January 1994 he signed a letter circulated by Senator Edward Kennedy seeking support for a visa for the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams.
On his retirement from the Senate he was appointed as the President's special adviser on Irish economic initiatives. He turned down an offer of a Supreme Court nomination from President Clinton.
A Catholic, he was married for a second time in December 1994 and has one child from his first marriage.