PARIS, Dec 23 (Reuter) - Italian European Commissioner Emma Bonino was voted "European of the Year" on Monday by an international jury headed by former Commission president Jacques Delors, the French magazine La Vie announced. The panel said Bonino, 48, brought "courage, determination and great strength of character" to her diverse beat in the Brussels executive, which ranges from humanitarian aid to fisheries and consumer affairs. "As a former leader of the transnational Radical Party, Emma Bonino has retained from her activist past a capacity for action and plain-speaking which she has used in her institutional functions to reinforce the cohesion of the European Union," the citation said. It singled her out especially for her action on humanitarian affairs, saying she had given a real lead in establishing a European humanitarian aid policy in ex-Yugoslavia and central Africa, giving Europe "a profoundly human face". She had been unbending on respect for human rights and in pursuit of peace based on hustice

, notably in demanding the disarming of the Hutu militias threatening Rwanda. Bonino collapsed with exhaustion early on Friday after battling for 21 hours to protect endangered fish stocks from the demands of EU ministers trying to keep their fishermen happy. "Bonino fought to the end, gave a final speech and fainted," her spokesman Filippo di Robilant said. The unorthodox commissioner has been at the front line on all of her beats, coming under fire in Somalia at Easter and confronting angry British fishermen in the autumn. Accusing Canada of piracy during the so-called turbot war in 1995, she showed her support for Spanish trawlermen in the north west Atlantic by being lowered onto deck from a helicopter. The French Roman Catholic weekly launched its prize in 1987 to distinguish "a European whose action, work, enterprise or personality represents a real European ideal". Last year's winner was German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.