David M. Gallup is the President and General Counsel of the World Service Authority (WSA), a global public service and human rights organization founded in 1954 in Washington, DC, and an organizational partner of World Federalist Movement – Canada and Citizens for Global Solutions. He has led the WSA since the early 1990s, carrying forward the work begun by World Citizen Garry Davis, the former World War II bomber pilot who founded the modern world citizenship movement. Gallup specializes in promoting, implementing, and educating about human rights, world citizenship, and world law, and oversees the WSA’s issuance of documents of global identity, including the World Citizen Card and the World Passport.
He is editor-in-chief of World Citizen News and author of the World Citizen Blog, and he convenes the World Court of Human Rights Coalition. For roughly fifteen years he served as secretary of the United Nations Association task forces on UN restructuring and on cultures of peace, and he contributed chapters to the UN Association report “Restructuring the UN to Meet 21st Century Global Needs.” His commentary has appeared in and been sought by international media, including the BBC.
Gallup earned a Juris Doctor in 1991 from the Washington College of Law at American University and holds undergraduate degrees in French and in History from Washington University in St. Louis (1988). His professional memberships include the Maryland, American, World Jurist, and World-Space bar associations. Writing in Mondial, he has argued that world citizenship is both an innate status grounded in shared humanity and a legal allegiance individuals may claim under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
