Eduard Kukan

Eduard Kukan (2014)

Eduard Kukan (born December 26, 1939 in Trnovec nad Váhom , Neutra-Pressburg County , Kingdom of Hungary , now Slovakia) is a Slovak diplomat and politician ( DÚ , SDKÚ-DS , independent since 2016). He was Slovakia's Foreign Minister from 1998 to 2006 and a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019 .

Life

Kukan studied and graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1964, receiving a doctorate in law from Charles University in Prague .

From 1964 to 1990 he was in various positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia; so he worked at the embassies in Lusaka (1968–1973), Washington, DC (1977–1981) and was ambassador to Addis Ababa (1985–1988). Shortly after the turnaround in 1989, when he also ended his membership in KSČ , which had existed since 1964 , he was appointed permanent representative of Czechoslovakia to the United Nations (1990-92). After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, he represented the Slovak Republic at the UN from 1993 to 1994.

From March to December 1994 he was Foreign Minister in the Moravčík Temporary Government . He was then a member of the liberal Democratic Union (DÚ) party from 1995 to 2000 and has been its chairman since 1997. Shortly before the 1998 parliamentary elections , he became a member of the Slovak Democratic Coalition , an alliance of bourgeois parties, including the DÚ, and was elected deputy chairman. Shortly after the parliamentary elections, on October 15, 1998, he was appointed Foreign Minister of the first government of Mikuláš Dzurinda and then remained in the second government of Dzurinda after the parliamentary elections in 2002 . From May 7, 1999 to June 30, 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was appointed UN Special Envoy for the Balkans .

In the 2004 presidential elections , he ran as a government candidate , but remained in the first round with 22.1% just behind Vladimír Mečiar and Ivan Gašparovič and could not take part in the runoff. In February 2000, the DÚ merged with the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ, since 2006 SDKÚ-DS), to which Kukan subsequently belonged. After the parliamentary elections in 2006 he became a member of the Slovak Parliament .

He resigned this mandate after he was elected member of the EU Parliament for the SDKÚ-DS in the 2009 European elections . There he sat in the Christian Democratic Group of the European People's Party (EPP), was chairman of the delegation for relations with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, member of the committee on foreign affairs and the subcommittee on human rights. After his re-election in the 2014 European elections , he was chairman of the delegation for the EU-Serbia Stabilization and Association Parliamentary Committee, and also a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Subcommittee on Security and Defense. In 2016, Kukan led the EU election observer mission to the parliamentary elections in Uganda. In November 2016, he resigned from the SDKÚ-DS, but remained as a non-party member of the EPP Group. In 2019 he left the European Parliament.

Kukan is married and has two children. He speaks English, Russian, Spanish and Swahili.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [1]  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• CV on the website of SDKÚ-DS
• Entry on Eduard Kukan in the European Parliament 's database of deputies