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H.E. Witold Waszczykowski

Minister of Foreign Affairs

Witold Waszczykowski, minister of foreign affairs, was born in Piotrkow Trybunalski on May 5, 1957. A diplomat with a degree in history, he holds a PhD in the humanities.

The chief of Polish diplomacy graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the University of Lodz (1980), and the Department of International Studies at the University of Oregon (1991) in the United States. From 1992 to 1993, he pursued postgraduate studies in international security and arms control at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland. In 1993, he was awarded a PhD in the humanities (history) for his dissertation “The United States and the Strategic Disarmament Negotiations in 1919-36.” From 1981 to 1987, he was an assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy and History of the University of Lodz.

He began his career with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the early 1990s. In 1992, he became a senior expert in the United Nations System Department and the European Institutions Department, and in 1996 he was named deputy director of the European Institutions Department, and then of the Security Policy Department. In 1997, he served as head of Poland’s Liaison Office to NATO in Brussels, and went on to become deputy permanent representative of Poland at the newly created diplomatic mission to the North Atlantic Alliance (1997-99). From 1999 to 2002, he was posted as Poland’s ambassador to Iran. In 2003, he worked at the Department of Foreign Policy Strategy and Planning, and in 2005 became deputy director of the Department of Africa and the Middle East. From 2005 to 2008, he was deputy foreign minister, also serving as the chief negotiator during Poland-US missile shield talks.

In 2008, he was appointed deputy head of the National Security Bureau. From 2011, he served as a Law and Justice deputy to the seventh Sejm. In parliament, he was deputy chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and a delegate to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Re-elected to the Sejm in the 2015 October general election, he received close to 33,000 votes, the best result in the Sieradz district.

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