The founder of EIP, Jacques Mühlethaler was born in 1918 of Swiss and French parentage. He was a soldier in a French Alps fighter unit during the German occupation of the Second World War, but despite his war medal, he rejected the legitimacy of the Vichy government. During the Second World War he lost a brother on the battlefront, and in 1958 during the Algerian war, he lost his other brother, a surgeon.

In 1941 he settled in Switzerland and five years later founded a publishing house that distributed French school textbooks. Deeply shocked at the way in which school history books tended to glamorise and extol war, he decided to undertake a world tour in order to advocate to political authorities that schools should serve to encourage and promote peace - hence his motto, "fewer guns, more pencils". Jacques Mühlethaler's temperament as a man of action, his independent spirit and his belief in democracy allowed him to enter into the public and political scene without being influenced by underlying tactical or political objectives. In Dublin, on 17 September 1961, he noted in his diary: "For two and a half years I have been travelling around the world, almost totally occupied by an idea capable of making possible the peaceful coexistence between people, opening the door to cooperation, and confronting mankind with our new dimensions . . . with our planet. Should I continue?" He answered this question by publishing the "universal principles of civic education" and, a short time afterwards, in 1967, by founding EIP, the NGO where his ideas came together and took form. The fundamental principle of EIP is the encounter with "the other". The value, strength . . . and incongruity . . . of this principle can be particularly appreciated in the global context of the time in which it was proposed. Arms dealers were making fortunes from the system of deterrence; "terror" was the norm. The instruments of war were gathering along the frontiers of a bipolar world which we claimed to be divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

In 1975 Jacques Mühlethaler undertook a hunger strike in order to heighten public awareness of the huge sums spent on arms and of the consequent lack of money for education in peace and tolerance. His writings, conserved in the EIP archives in Geneva, recall his meetings with the major world players of the day from both the East and the West. Always and everywhere in these writings one finds the same conviction: to impel the political authorities to include the teaching of human rights and peace as part of education.

This visionary man gathered around him a diverse group of people who formed the core of what is today the oldest international NGO dedicated to human rights and peace education. Until his death in 1994, Jacques Mühlethaler continued to contribute to the success of EIP. He encouraged lone activists to group together in national branches. Today, EIP has more than 5000 members and its international network is made up of 36 national divisions including EIP-Quebec, founded in Montreal in 1996.

The principle objectives of EIP are, firstly, to advocate the complete and effective recognition of the right to education for everyone, including both formal and non-formal education. Secondly, EIP maintains a consistent pedagogical approach that encourages peaceful conflict resolution. These two objectives assume, to be sure, a sound understanding of the state of educational systems as well as of pedagogical ideas and practices. But they also require an understanding of the political, economic, social and cultural issues from which educational ideologies are woven; the dominant values underlying the whole framework of educational politics.

To be an activist for the right to education and peace involves committing oneself as a citizen, aware of one's own polticial responsibility. To a large extent, this explains why EIP continues and will continue to pressure States and international governmental organisations, so that human rights and peace education become established as an integral part of educational politics.