Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson

Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson (born February 21, 1939 in Ísafjörður ) is an Icelandic politician.

Life

Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson is the son of the politician Hannibal Valdimarsson (1903–1991). He attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated with a Masters Degree in Economics in 1963. He then studied at Stockholm University for another year and then went on to do teacher training at Iceland University . From 1976 to 1977 he attended the "Center for European Studies" at Harvard University .

From 1982 to 1998 he was a member of the Icelandic parliament Althing for what was then the constituency of Reykjavík. As a politician, he first gained notoriety beyond Iceland when he was elected chairman of the Icelandic Social Democrats in 1984 . In 1987 he became part of the Icelandic government as Minister of Finance.

In 1988 he moved to the outdoor department and thus was Iceland's foreign policy representative at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union . Even before the political change in Eastern Europe, Jón Baldvin had shown great interest in this region and made several trips to countries of the " Eastern Bloc ". He openly supported the emancipation of Eastern European nations, including those within the Soviet Union , from Moscow's central power. Jón Baldvin's brisk approach to the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was sometimes criticized as undiplomatic and contrary to his own interests. For example, Federal Foreign Minister Genscher said (as Jón Baldvin later reported) that a foreign policy such as Iceland could endanger German reunification . Following the foreign policy line, Iceland was the first country to recognize the Baltic states' declaration of independence, while the other western states took a wait-and-see attitude out of consideration for Gorbachev, who had been overthrown by the “ August coup ” these days .

Since March 16, 1998 Jón Baldvin was Icelandic Ambassador to the United States, from June 10, 1998 also to Canada . He left the latter post on April 9, 2001, when his own Icelandic embassy opened in Ottawa, Canada , and Hjálmar W. Hannesson became the first Icelandic ambassador to Canada. Jón Baldvin continued to serve as ambassador to the USA until he was replaced by Helgi Ágústsson on December 9, 2002 .

Sexual harassment scandals of minors:

In 2012 it became known that Jón Baldvin had sent a series of sexually explicit letters to Guðrún Harðardóttir, a young niece of his wife, between 1998-2001. In one of the letters, Jón Baldvin described how he thought of his young niece while having sex with his wife. Other letters contained sexually explicit and erotic topics. Guðrún, who was a teenager at the time, tried to bring charges against Jón Baldvin in 2005 for sexual harassment, but the investigation was dropped by police.

Jón Baldvin's letters were made available to the public by Guðrún in the monthly magazine Nýtt Líf in February 2012 and subsequently published on his personal website. In his testimony, he denied having sexually molested Guðrún, but apologized for "good judgment" when initiating correspondence with her.

The scandal re-emerged in 2013 when Jón Baldvin was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Iceland. The University of Iceland withdrew the invitation due to public objections to his appointment. Jón Baldvin protested the university's decision in a series of newspaper articles. After Jón Aldvin threatened the lawsuit because there was no legal reason for his dismissal, the university agreed to pay him ISK 500,000 in compensation and publicly apologized for handling the matter.

In January 2019, the Icelandic press published a series of articles about a #MeToo group on Facebook, in which women discussed sexual harassment by Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson when they were underage. These cases date back to the 1960s. The most recent incident occurred in Spain in the summer of 2018. Aldís Schram, a daughter of Jón Baldvin, reported on the public radio station Rás 2 of two incidents he experienced as a child.

She described that when she confronted her father a few years later, he made sure that she was taken to a psychiatric hospital several times. He is also said to have used his political power as Iceland's ambassador in Washington and sent instructions with an official embassy problem to the Icelandic Ministry of Justice.

So far, Jón Baldvin has denied all allegations and called the reports of the women who surfaced in January 2019 and accused him of sexual harassment and violence either a fiction or a lack of reality.