27 Facts About Klaus Kinkel

Klaus Kinkel was a German statesman, civil servant, diplomat and lawyer who served as the minister of Foreign affairs and the vice chancellor of Germany in the government of Helmut Kohl.

Klaus Kinkel was President of Federal Intelligence Service from 1979 to 1982 and a state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Justice from 1982 to 1991.

Klaus Kinkel left the government in 1998 following its electoral defeat.

Klaus Kinkel was a member of the Bundestag from 1994 to 2002, and was later active as a lawyer and philanthropist.

Klaus Kinkel personified an "assertive foreign policy", increased Germany's peacekeeping engagements overseas, was at the forefront among Western leaders of building a relationship with Boris Yeltsin's newly democratic Russian Federation and pressed for Germany to be given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Klaus Kinkel championed the Maastricht Treaty, the merging of the Western European Union with the EU to give the EU an independent military capability and the expansion of the EU.

Klaus Kinkel played a central role in the efforts to resolve the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and proposed the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Klaus Kinkel was born in Metzingen, Baden-Wurttemberg, into a Catholic family, and grew up mostly in Hechingen, where his father Ludwig Leonhard Klaus Kinkel practised as a medical doctor and internist.

Klaus Kinkel's father was President of the local tennis club, and Klaus Kinkel was an able tennis player in his youth.

Klaus Kinkel took his Abitur at the Staatliches Gymnasium Hechingen in 1956 and first studied medicine, then law at the universities of Tubingen and Bonn.

Klaus Kinkel took his first juristic state exam at Tubingen, the second in Stuttgart and earned a doctorate of law in 1964 in Cologne.

In 1965, Klaus Kinkel began work at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, concentrating on the security of the civilian population.

Klaus Kinkel was sent to the Landratsamt in Balingen, Baden-Wurttemberg until 1966.

Klaus Kinkel was personal secretary and speechwriter for the Federal Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, from 1970 to 1974, and eventually the head of the minister's office.

Klaus Kinkel is credited with "quietly and competently" restoring confidence in the BND after a series of scandal in the preceding years.

From 1982 to 1991, Klaus Kinkel was a state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Justice.

Klaus Kinkel was Federal Minister of Justice from 18 January 1991 to 18 May 1992.

Klaus Kinkel engaged in public negotiations with the terrorist Red Army Faction, successfully urging them to renounce violence.

Klaus Kinkel played a key role in the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and helped to draft its statutes.

Klaus Kinkel unsuccessfully introduced a resolution at a meeting of European Community foreign ministers that would have committed each of the member countries to accept more refugees from the Balkans.

Klaus Kinkel was a signatory of the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War in 1995.

One year later, China abruptly canceled a planned visit to Beijing by Klaus Kinkel, citing a German parliamentary resolution that condemned China's human rights record in Tibet.

From 21 January 1993, Klaus Kinkel was Vice Chancellor of Germany.

Klaus Kinkel resigned as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor after the government's defeat in the 1998 federal election.

Klaus Kinkel was a member of the Bundestag, the Parliament of Germany, from 1994 to 2002.

At the request of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Klaus Kinkel represented the German government at the 2011 funeral of Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

In November 2016, Klaus Kinkel was elected as president of a newly created ethics commission of the German Football Association ; the commission is part of the DFB's declared drive for more transparency and integrity following revelations of a financial scandal around the 2006 FIFA World Cup it hosted.