Michael Koch (diplomat)

Michael HW Koch (born September 30, 1955 in Kansas City , USA ) is a German diplomat and since 2018 Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Holy See .

Life

The son of a diplomat attended schools in Amsterdam , Bonn , Ottawa and Rabat and completed his education in 1973 with the Baccalauréat . He then began studying law at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and passed the first state examination in 1978 . After the subsequent legal clerkship in Bielefeld, he passed the second state examination in 1981 . After completing a brief internship in a law firm in Toronto , he was a research assistant at the Institute for International Law at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel between 1982 and 1986 , where he also met his future wife Ingrid Jahn-Koch. They have three children together. Koch's brother is the American neuroscientist Christof Koch .

career

In 1986 Koch joined the Foreign Service and, after completing his training as an attaché, worked from 1987 to 1988 as a consultant in the sub-department for the European Community at the Foreign Office in Bonn . During his subsequent work at the Consulate General in San Francisco from 1988 to 1991, he was in 1990 at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn with a thesis on the topic to introduce a bill of rights in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for a doctor of law doctorate .

Subsequently, between 1991 and 1995 he was first deputy office manager and then office manager of the Federal Government Coordinator for German-American Cooperation Werner Weidenfeld , before he was then permanent representative of the ambassador in Myanmar until 1998 . After a subsequent assignment as head of the "Future Perspectives of the Foreign Service" task force in the central department of the Foreign Office, he was head of the Political Department of the Embassy in India between 2001 and 2004 and then head of the Afghanistan task force in the Foreign Office in Berlin . Michael Koch was Ambassador to Pakistan from August 2008 to April 2012 .

On February 10, 2012, the Federal Foreign Office announced that Koch would be the successor to the resigned Michael Steiner as special representative of the German federal government for Afghanistan and Pakistan . He succeeded Michael Steiner and Bernd Mützelburg in this office , who, however, was only responsible to the Foreign Office and not to the entire federal government like his two successors. His successor as ambassador to Pakistan on July 12, 2012 was Cyrill Nunn , who had previously been the Federal Foreign Office's representative for Asia and Pacific policy. From the beginning of July 2015, Koch was an international law advisor to the federal government and head of the legal department at the Federal Foreign Office. On August 6, 2018, the Catholic Michael Koch succeeded Annette Schavan as German ambassador to the Holy See .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Koch becomes the new Afghanistan representative. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 10, 2012, accessed February 10, 2012 . 
2. ↑ Koch heads the legal department at the Foreign Office. In: politics and communication. August 10, 2015, accessed August 11, 2015 . 
3. ↑ heiliger-stuhl.diplo.de ; Diplomat succeeds Schavan. Michael Koch. Deutschlandfunk , accessed on May 31, 2018 . 

predecessor	Office	successor
Gunter Mulack	German Ambassador to Islamabad (Pakistan) 2008–2012	Cyrill Nunn
Annette Schavan	German ambassador to the Holy See since 2018	...