Klaus Kinkel (17 December 1936 – 4 March 2019) was a German civil servant, lawyer, and politician of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).

He served as Federal Minister of Justice (1991–1992), Foreign Minister (1992–1998) and as Vice Chancellor of Germany(1993–1998) in the government of Helmut Kohl. He was also chairman of the liberal Free Democratic Party from 1993 to 1995. Previously, he was President of the Federal Intelligence Service (1979–1982).

As Foreign Minister, Kinkel took a clear stance to end the atrocities committed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and proposed the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

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Education

The son of a doctor, Kinkel was born in Metzingen, Baden-Württemberg, into a Catholic family. He took his Abitur at the Staatliches Gymnasium Hechingen in 1956 and first studied medicine, then law at the universities of Tübingen and Bonn. He joined A.V. Guestfalia Tübingen, a Catholic student fraternity that is member of the Cartellverband. Kinkel took his first juristic state exam at Tübingen, the second in Stuttgart and earned a doctorate of law in 1964 in Cologne.

Career as a civil servant

In 1965, Kinkel began work at the at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, working on the security of civil people (ziviler Bevölkerungsschutz). He was sent to the Landratsamt in Balingen, Baden-Württemberg until 1966. He returned to the national ministry in 1968. He first worked on interior security and  He 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. After Genscher was appointed Foreign Minister in 1974, Kinkel held senior positions in the Federal Foreign Office, as head of the Leitungsstab and the policy planning staff (Planungsstab).

President of the Federal Intelligence Service

From 1979 to 1982 he was president of the Federal Intelligence Service.

Secretary of state

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

Political career

Federal Minister of Justice

Kinkel was Federal Minister of Justice from 18 January 1991 to 18 May 1992. Among other achievements, he took the lead in pressing for the return of Erich Honecker, the former East German leader, to face trial. He also engaged in public negotiations with the terrorist Red Army Faction, successfully urging them to renounce violence.

Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs and FDP chairman

In a surprise decision on 29 April 1992, the members of the FDP parliamentary group rejected the nomination of Germany's designated new Foreign Minister, Irmgard Schwaetzer, and voted instead to name Kinkel to head the Federal Foreign Office.

During his tenure as Foreign Minister, Kinkel made substantial efforts to end the atrocities committed by Serbs in the Yugoslav Wars. In 1992, he proposed the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and – 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. Later that year, he announced Germany's wish for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, arguing that Britain and France would never agree to an alternative plan under which they would merge their national seats into a single permanent seat representing the European Union.

Under the leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Kinkel, the German Bundestag in 1993 agreed on a three-point amendment to the 1949 Constitution that for the first time let German troops take part in international peacekeeping operations sanctioned by the United Nations and other bodies, subject to advance approval by parliament. Shortly after, the German Parliament approved a controversial troop deployment under the umbrella of the United Nations Operation in Somalia II, clearing the final hurdle for what was then Germany's biggest deployment of ground forces abroad since World War II.[10] Also under Kinkel’s leadership, Germany began destroying stockpiles of tanks and other heavy weapons in the early 1990s, becoming the first country to implement the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.

In 1995, China dismissed a personal appeal from Kinkel and expelled journalist Henrik Bork, a reporter for the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, to release Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng. One year later, China abruptly canceled a planned visit to Beijing by Kinkel, citing a German parliamentary resolution that condemned China's human rights record in Tibet.

A strong supporter of European integration, Kinkel successfully advocated for Germany to ratify the Maastricht Treaty on European political and economic union in December 1992, making it the 10th of the 12 European Community nations to sign on. In 1994, he had to abandon his candidate for President of the European Commission, Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene of Belgium, following protest by British Prime Minister John Major. In 1997, he argued that Turkey did not qualify because of its record on "human rights, the Kurdish question, relations with Greece and of course very clear economic questions." On Kinkel’s initiative, Germany became the first government to declare a suspension of contacts with Bosnia's envoys abroad after a recommendation made by the High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Carlos Westendorp.

From 21 January 1993, Kinkel was also Vice-Chancellor of Germany. From 1993 to 1995 he also served as chairman of the FDP. After the Free Democrats won barely enough votes to get into the Bundestag in 1994 and later lost badly in 12 out of 14 state and European Parliament elections, Kinkel announced that he would not seek re-election as party chairman. He resigned as Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor after the government's defeat in the 1998 federal election.

Member of Parliament

Kinkel was a member of the Bundestag, the Parliament of Germany, from 1994 to 2002. From 1998 to 2002, he served as deputy chairman of the FDP parliamentary group. Kinkel was elected from the state of Baden-Württemberg.

Life after politics

After leaving government in 1998, Kinkel has worked as a lawyer and been engaged in a number of philanthropic and business activities, including the following:

• Bundesliga Foundation, Member of the Board of Trustees
• Sepp Herberger Foundation, Member of the Board of Trustees
• International Club La Redoute Bonn, Member of the Advisory Board
• United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN), Member of the Presidium
• Deutsche Initiative für den Nahen Osten (DINO), Member of the Board of Trustees
• Lehman Brothers, Member of European Advisory Council (since 2002)
• Deutsche Telekom Foundation, Founding Chairman of the Executive Board (2003-2014)
• EnBW, Member of the Advisory Board (2004-2009)

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

In November 2016, Kinkel was elected as president of a newly created ethics commission of the German Football Association (DFB); 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.

Publication

• Bewegte Zeiten für Europa!, in: Robertson-von Trotha, Caroline Y. (ed.): Europa in der Welt – die Welt in Europa (= Kulturwissenschaft interdisziplinär/Interdisciplinary Studies on Culture and Society, Vol. 1), Baden-Baden 2006, ISBN 978-3-8329-1934-4