Steve is a 30-year veteran of the Foreign Service, with overseas postings to Bamako, Dakar, Harare, Maseru, Madrid, Geneva and Strasbourg as well as assignments in the State Department Bureaus for African Affairs, International Organizations, and Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.  In the latter position, Steve was a member of the U.S. Delegation to the founding Ministerial Meeting of the Community of Democracies (Warsaw, June 2000) and the follow-up meeting in Washington of democracy-related regional organizations (January, 2001).  Upon retirement from State in 2002, he received a three-year appointment as First Deputy Director of the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the OSCE, the world’s largest regional intergovernmental organization.  As Acting Director of ODIHR, he represented the OSCE at the Second CD Ministerial, (Seoul, November 2002), and at an Eastern Europe Regional Meeting of CD governments (Bucharest, November 2003).  After leaving ODIHR, he worked for the UN’s Electoral Assistance Division on parliamentary and presidential elections in the Solomon Islands in 2006 and in Timor-Leste in 2007.  Steve was a participant at the CCD-organized Budapest conference on Prospects for Democratic Transition in the Middle East and North Africa in October 2007 and served as the general editor of the conference’s Final Report.  Steve and his wife Jamilée Faddoul al-Achkar live in suburban Virginia; they have two grown sons, Anthony and Kevin.