The youngest president.

Stoyan Ganev, elected President of the forty-seventh session of the General Assembly on 15 September, is the youngest person to hold that office. Since 8 November 1991, he has served as Foreign Minister in Bulgaria's first non-communist cabinet in 47 years. Until July, he was also Deputy Prime Minister.

Born in Pazardjik, Bulgaria, on 23 July 1955, Mr. Ganev graduated from Sofia University's Faculty of Law in 1979 and defended a thesis on constitutional law at Moscow University in 1985. He has been a lecturer at the Sofia University and at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Germany.

Mr. Ganev supports an enhancement of the UN role for consolidating world peace and security and for making it more effective in finding solutions to political, socio-economic, environmental and other problems.

As Foreign Minister, while visiting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussel in November 1991, Mr. Ganev launched the idea of convening a tripartite meeting of Foreign Ministers of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.

He is Chairman of coordinating body on Bulgaria's accession to the Council on Europe and is his Government's chief envoy in the negotiations on his country's association with the European Community.

In December 1991, at the inaugural session of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in Brussels, he proposed for the meeting's concluding document items on the need for assistance to achieve economic reforms in Eastern Europe and on the importance of regional security structures as an element in overall European security.