FACTBOX: Five facts about French foreign minister Kouchner

(Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy picked maverick left-winger Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister on Friday, an unorthodox move that backs up his campaign pledge to put human rights at the heart of France's diplomacy.

Below are five facts about him.

* Kouchner, an outspoken former health minister and ex-U.N. 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 Medecins Sans Frontieres.

* His appointment is the first time a French president has named someone from another political camp to such a senior post -- a coup for Sarkozy and one that ties to his pledge to make human rights one of his foreign policy priorities

* A gastroenterologist by training, Kouchner, 67, strongly criticized Sarkozy during the campaign, saying he had "no shame fishing in the waters of the extreme right"

* He was U.N. governor for Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and one of the rare French politicians who spoke out in favor of a military intervention in Iraq in 2003, saying he was against war but also against Saddam Hussein's regime

* When famine and civil war in Somalia peaked in December 1992, Kouchner paraded on a Mogadishu beach before a clutch of television crews carrying a bag of rice on his shoulder.

The French press denounced the move as self-promotion in a country where the problem was not lack of food aid, but an inability to prevent armed gangs from stealing it.