He was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1951. He moved to the Republic of the Congo by the age of 12. He spent 16 years in Africa. He studied medicine in Belgium, where he worked and lived for around 20 years. He is married to Maria Luísa Ferreira da Silva Nemésio, paternal granddaughter of Vitorino Nemésio, and has one son: Alexandre Focquet de La Vieter Nobre and three daughters: Isabel Focquet de La Vieter Nobre, Leonor Nemésio de La Vieter Nobre and Gabriela Nemésio de La Vieter Nobre.
AMI
He was part of Médecins Sans Frontières from 1977 to 1983. In December 1984 he founded in Portugal the NGO AMI — Assistência Médica Internacional. He has participated in humanitarian missions in over 180 countries.
On February 19, 2010 he announced that he would be an independent presidential candidate to the 2011 Portuguese presidential election. Without any party support, he had a result of 14% of the votes, achieving 3rd place.
After the election he declared that he was uninterested in partisan politics and refused the idea of turning his supporting movement into a party. He was deserted by some of his previous supporters after accepting an invite by the centre-right Social Democratic leader Pedro Passos Coelho to be the head of the Social Democratic lists and to run for MP for Lisbon for the elections which would happen in June 2011 after the fall of the Sócrates government. The fact that Nobre, considered a leftist and a Soaristsocialist and who had supported the Left Bloc in 2009, was heading the electoral lists of a rightwing party. Other supporters were disappointed by the fact that he was involved in a party at all after what he had said about not involving in party politics. Nobre defended himself that he trusted Passos Coelho personally and that only who doesn't look for the truth never changes his mind. He also stated that he believed the left-right division was worn out, and remembered that he had supported other rightists like José Manuel Durão Barroso in 2003 and António Capucho for the City Hall of Cascais. Nobre was elected, despite much discussion over his acceptance of the offer with a quite positive result over Socialist competitor Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues. Despite the apparent support of the Social Democratic seats in the Parliament, on 20 June 2011, in the first meeting of the Parliament elected by the 5 June election, Nobre failed to be elected Speaker even after two round of voting. It is argued that his defeat was not only due to opposition in the Social Democrats to having an independent as the highest standing among them in Parliament, to opposition of all parties to a non-partisan in Parliament. After failing to become Speaker of the Assembly, Nobre renounced his seat. He still attended to the parliamentary meeting of 21 June and had two justified absences on the meetings of 30 June and 1 July. Since then, he has not had involvement in politics except for some political commentaries in television.
