Otto Schily
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Otto Georg Schily (born July 20, 1932) was Federal Minister of the Interior of Germany from 1998 to 2005, in the cabinet of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
Born in Bochum as the son of a mining plant director, he grew up in a family of anthroposophists. His younger brother is Konrad Schily, an academic and also a politician. In 1962, he passed his second state exam after having studied law and politics in Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin, thus being admitted to the bar; a year later, he opened his own law practice.
In the 1970s, he became a public figure as a trial lawyer, defending several terrorists of the left-wing Red Army Faction. In 1971, he represented his then-friend Horst Mahler (who would later become an advocate of the right-wing NPD); during the Stammheim trial (1975–1977), he was the only remaining attorney of Gudrun Ensslin. While he gained popularity and respect for acting according to his own moral principles, some accused him of supporting the radicals' goals.
In 1980, he became founding member of the Green Party and was elected to the Bundestag in 1983. Due to the party's then-policy of rotating its representatives, he had to leave parliament in 1986, but he was re-elected in 1987. Increasingly estranged from the fundamentalist wing of the Greens, particularly regarding alliances with larger parties, he left the party in 1989, resigned from his seat in parliament, and joined the Social Democrats (SPD) instead – which he represented in the new Bundestag in 1990. In the following years, he was active on affairs of former East Germany and coordinating various legal policies of the SPD.
After Gerhard Schröder became chancellor in 1998, he appointed Schily Minister of the Interior. He was frequently criticized for relatively conservative policies, for example pushing through German anti-terrorist legislation after the September 11 terrorist attacks, which many saw as contradictory to his earlier beliefs. On the other hand, political analysts viewed him as an indispensable member of the cabinet in order not to leave Schröder susceptible to conservative criticism on issues of crime and immigration. At more than 70 years of age, he was also the oldest member of the cabinet.
After being minister he became a supervisory board member of two companies for biometric technologies, raising questions whether he now takes advantage of his work as minister, for example the implementation of biometric passports[citation needed].
On March 29, 2007 he took the blame for the handling of the case of Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2001, turned over to U.S. authorities and held at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba as a terror suspect. Kurnaz was released in 2006 and returned to Germany.[1]
Schily is married for the second time and has two daughters from his first marriage, Jenny, born 1967 (an actress), and Anna, born 1981.
[edit] References
- German Historic Museum biography of Otto Schily (German)
- Portrait in the Financial Times Deutschland (German)
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
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