An EDP vice president since 2019, Karl Viktor Erjavec is a Slovenian lawyer and politician who served in the Slovenian government as deputy prime minister 2012-2020 as well as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2012 to 2018. He was president of Demokratična stranka upokojencev Slovenije (DeSUS), or Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia, from 2005 to January 2020 and again from December 2020 until March 2021. Before then, Erjavec was minister of defense on two occasions, from 2004 to 2008 and 2018 until 2020. He also served as Minister of Environment and Spatial Planning from 2008 to 2010. Before that, he was State Secretary for the Ministry of Justice from 2001 until 2004. Before that, he was director of the Expert Service and head of the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman from 1995 to 2000. He entered public service at local level as town administrator in the town of Kranj after Slovenian democratisation in 1990. Born in 1960 in Aiseau, Belgium, into a family of Slovene immigrants, he moved in 1972 with his family back to Slovenia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He graduated in 1985 from the Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana.
As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen international cooperation between democratic forces, the EDP recently hosted a transatlantic dinner discussion in Paris, bringing together key figures from European and American centrist politics.
Thirty years ago, in Srebrenica, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered by the Bosnian Serb army. In 2007, the International Court of Justice ruled that the atrocities constituted genocide. The wider Bosnian War saw over 100,000 killed, thousands of women raped, and more than two million people forced from their homes between 1992 and 1995. On this solemn occasion remembering one of the darkest chapters in Europe’s recent history, the ALDE Party, LIBSEEN members in the region, ALDE in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, European Democratic Party, Liberal International, LYMEC, Renew Europe in the Committee of the Regions, Renew Europe in the European Parliament, and the Young Democrats for Europe are united in honouring their memory and issue the following statement:
The outbreak of war between Iran, Israel and the United States has temporarily subsided, but the balance remains fragile.
