France:Nicolas Sarkozy's new foreign minister has an outspoken track record, write Francois Murphyand Kerstin Gehmlichin Paris.
The appointment of Bernard Kouchner as France's foreign minister is an unorthodox choice that backs up the new president Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign pledge to put human rights at the heart of France's diplomacy.
Kouchner, an outspoken former health minister and ex-UN governor of Kosovo, is one of France's most popular figures, largely due to humanitarian work which includes co-founding the Nobel Peace Prize-winning aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières.
Kouchner, nicknamed the "French doctor", has the reputation of being impulsive, and some political analysts foresee possible problems for him working alongside Sarkozy.
"He's capable of storming out of the job. We don't know whether it will last," said political analyst Henri Rey.
However, Kouchner, a gastroenterologist who made his name by drawing attention to the famine caused by the Biafran war, has also shown himself to be a pragmatist by accepting the job even though he criticised Sarkozy during the campaign.
When Sarkozy said he planned to set up a ministry for immigration and national identity, Kouchner accused him of having "no shame fishing in the waters of the extreme right".
Like the new president, 67-year-old Kouchner, who is married to journalist Christine Ockrent, is fond of soundbites.
He embarrassed the French government in which he served in the early 1990s by branding the late Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko a "walking bank safe in a leopard-skin hat" just as French troops were intervening to drive out anti-Mobutu rebels.
During his time in Kosovo, where he was UN governor from 1999 to 2001, he spoke out on a range of issues, sometimes complaining that the West was turning its attention and resources away from Kosovo too quickly, on other occasions launching fierce denunciations of ethnically motivated attacks.
But he has similar convictions to Sarkozy on key issues, such as the plight of Africa, much of it once colonised by France.
Sarkozy has said he wants to put more pressure on Russia over Chechnya and on Sudan over Darfur, and has broken with his predecessor Jacques Chirac by opposing the lifting of an EU arms embargo against China.
Kouchner has been a leading advocate of "humanitarian intervention" - the right to get involved in another country's affairs if human rights are being abused. He was one of the rare French politicians who spoke out in favour of military intervention in Iraq in 2003. - (Reuters)