United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is to be given an honorary degree by Oxford University later this month.

He is to give a talk at The Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street, Oxford, on June 19 on the topic "Why democracy is an international issue".

The following day, University Chancellor Lord Jenkins of Hillhead will award the honorary degrees to Mr Annan, pictured below, and eight other people.

They are:

**Prof Eric Hobsbawm, Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of London

**Dr William Bowen, President of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and former Provost and President of Princeton University

**Former Nowegian Prime Minister Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of the World Health Organisation since 1998

**Prof Tim Berners-Lee OBE, who invented the World Wide Web and is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, where he read Physics

**Prof Walter Kohn, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998.

**Prof Sir Gustav Nossal, leading immunologist and Professor Emeritus of The University of Melbourne.

Dame Felicity Lott, the internationally acclaimed soprano.