Jan Kavan

Jan Kavan (2014)

Jan Kavan (top row, in the middle) in the UN (2002)

Jan Kavan (born October 17, 1946 in London ) is a Czech social democratic politician of the ČSSD and diplomat. He is a former Czech Foreign Minister and Vice Prime Minister and, as President, chaired the 57th General Assembly of the United Nations .

Early life and exile (until 1989)

Kavan was born in London to an English teacher and a Czechoslovak diplomat. After the Communists came to power in 1950, his father was recalled to Prague and sentenced to 25 years in prison in the show trial against the group around Rudolf Slánský . His father died of the consequences of imprisonment after his release in 1960 at the age of 46. These experiences shaped Kavan.

He became one of the leaders of the student movement during the Prague Spring in the 1960s and therefore emigrated from Czechoslovakia after the suppression by the Soviets in 1968, and settled in London. There he studied politics and international relations. Kavan later set up an independent press agency in Great Britain , the Palach Press Agency , which became the main distribution medium of Charter 77 in Western Europe . That is why the communists withdrew his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979.

1990s

Kavan returned to Prague during the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. He was elected to the Czechoslovak Parliament in the first democratic elections in 1990, to which he belonged until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia at the end of 1992. In 1993, Kavan joined the ČSSD and was elected to the newly established Senate in 1996 . Foreign policy became his main focus, so that after the election victory of the Social Democrats, he was first appointed Foreign Minister under Miloš Zeman in 1998 and then Deputy Prime Minister in 1999.

2000s

From January 2002, Kavan was briefly the Czech representative at the EU Constitutional Convention , but resigned from this post in the summer of the same year. Before that, his term of office in the Czech government ended in July 2002. In the following parliamentary elections he won a seat and remained a member of parliament until 2006. From September 10, 2002 to September 16, 2003 he was also President of the General Assembly of the UN .

He is a member of the European Leadership Network .

literature

• Rosemary Kavan: No spring in Prague . Bergisch Gladbach: Lübbe, 1992. 510 pp. - the English original was published under the title Freedom at a Price (London, 1985) or Love and Freedom (New York, 1988)

Web links

• Biography with photo of Kavan of the UN regional office - UNRIC (status 2002) ( German )