Hans, 63, lives in Bray, Co Wicklow Ireland with his wife Sally, a former cook on the Greenpeace ship Sirius, and their 11-year-old twin boys. He works for a Dutch-based international children's rights organisation, Terre des Hommes, and has run some 250 projects in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He still has a strong interest in ships and two projects have involved operating hospital vessels in Bangladesh and Brazil. Another project, which identified more than 1000 pedosexuals from 71 countries, created a media storm which he says he hadn’t experienced since the bombing.
After 1985, Hans led Greenpeace’s successful campaign to stop the dumping of radioactive waste at sea. He famously served three months in jail for his part in a protest blocking the discharge of radioactive waste into the Irish Sea from the British plutonium factory at Sellafield. After working as campaign director in the Netherlands, he left Greenpeace in the early 1990s and after a stint running a restaurant started his job with Terre des Hommes.