Piet Vermeylen

This article should be edited. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

Piet (Pierre) Vermeylen ( April 8, 1904 , † December 30, 1991 ) was a Belgian socialist politician .

biography

The son of the Flemish writer and politician August Vermeylen studied law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) after school and was one of the founders of a Flemish student union there in 1924 . After completing his studies, he worked as a lawyer and in 1933 was one of the judges at the London- based “counter court” to the Reichstag fire . Together with Henri Storck and André Thirifays, he founded the Royal Belgian Film Archive in 1938.

After his father's death in 1945, he followed him to the Flemish Socialist Party in Brussels and became a member of the Chamber of Deputies . Despite the actions of the German occupying power against his father, he vehemently protested against the execution of the Flemish collaborator August Borms.

In March 1947 he was first appointed to a government by Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak as Minister of the Interior and was a member of Spaak's cabinet until the end of his term in August 1949.

Between April 1954 and June 1958 he was again Minister of the Interior in Achille Van Acker's cabinet . As such, he had to significantly defend the new school laws drafted by the Minister of Education Léo Collard for the liberal- socialist coalition against the Roman Catholic opposition . There was a particular controversy when he banned Belgian radio from reporting on a large-scale demonstration against Collard's school laws.

In April 1961 he was appointed Minister of Justice in the cabinet of Prime Minister Théo Lefèvre , to which he was a member until the end of Lefèvre's term on July 28, 1965. In this capacity, in 1961, he submitted the first draft law for the amnesty of Belgian collaborators with the German occupying power during the Second World War . In April 1964 he tried unsuccessfully to soothe the anger of numerous doctors over a speech by Prime Minister Lefèvre in order to prevent the doctors' strike that followed. When he did not succeed in doing this, he ordered the mobilization of all hospital doctors and the doctors of the reserve of the Belgian armed forces in order to safeguard the health system .

1952–1954, 1965–1966 and 1972–1974 he was a member of the European Parliament.

On July 12, 1966, he was honored with the title of Minister of State .

When in 1968 the French-speaking socialist politicians, led by Henri Simonet, drew up the list of candidates for the parliamentary elections to ensure that Vermeylen, Hendrik Fayat and other Flemish socialists from Brussels and the Halle-Vilvoorde arrondissement were not elected, Piet Vermeylen took the unexpected step of one Split of the party and the establishment of a separate Flemish Socialist Party, the Rode Leeuwen . For this he was again elected to the Chamber of Deputies and a year later the leadership of the PSB recognized the “Red Lions” as an association of the BSP for Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde.

After his surprising re-election, he was appointed first minister for Dutch language education in June 1968 by Christian Social Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens , while Abel Dubois became first minister for French language education. He was a member of Eysken's cabinet until 1972.

When Warsaw Pact troops marched into the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) to crush the Prague Spring in August 1968 , he visited the city of Brno as a normal tourist and narrowly escaped the events via Austria .

publication

• Een Gulzig Leven. Kritak, Leuven 1984, ISBN 90-6303-132-7 . ( Autobiography )

Web link

• Belgian Ministries (rulers.org)