Katarina Barley

Katarina Barley (born 19 November 1968) is a German politician and lawyer who has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2019, serving as one of its Vice-Presidents. She served as Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in the fourth Cabinet of Angela Merkel. Prior to that, she had served as Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and since 28 September 2017 also as the acting Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, both until 14 March 2018.

A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Barley served as a member of the Bundestag from 2013 until 2019 and was Secretary-General of her party from 2015 to 2017. She holds law degrees from France and Germany and a doctorate in European law, and formerly worked as a corporate lawyer with the law firm Wessing & Berenberg-Gossler in Hamburg, as a judge and as a governmental legal adviser. Barley holds citizenship of both Germany and Britain.

Barley was born and grew up in Cologne; her father was an English-born journalist who worked with the English-language service of Germany's international broadcaster, the Deutsche Welle, and her mother was a German physician. From birth, she only held British citizenship and acquired German citizenship some years later. She is fluent in German, English, and French.

Barley's father (born 1935) was originally from Lincolnshire. She said her father grew up in a working-class family on a very small and simple farm that lacked electricity, and that he was awarded a scholarship to attend university after being discovered as a talented pupil by his teacher; however after being turned down by the University of Cambridge, he decided as a matter of principle to turn his back on British universities and move to West Germany to attend university instead; he first moved to Hanover and later to West Berlin, where he found society to be more egalitarian and progressive. In Germany he met Barley's mother and was employed as a journalist with Deutsche Welle's English service in Cologne after graduating. Her mother (born 1940) belonged to an upper-middle-class family from eastern Germany and was the daughter of an engineer in the automotive industry; her family fled the Red Army in 1945 and came as refugees from Stalinism to western Germany. Barley has said that she had a happy childhood, but that she grew up with a strong sense of social justice, influenced by her parents' experiences. Although neither of her parents were born in that part of Europe, she identifies culturally as a Rhinelander.

Barley studied at the University of Marburg and the University of Paris-Sud. She graduated with a French law degree (Diplôme de droit français) in 1990 and a German law degree in 1993. In 1998, she earned a doctoral degree in European law at the University of Münster. Supervised by Bodo Pieroth, her thesis was on the constitutional right of citizens of the European Union to vote in municipal elections.

Barley was called to the bar in 1998 and worked as a lawyer with the major Hamburg corporate law firm Wessing & Berenberg-Gossler (now Taylor Wessing, following the merger with a British law firm) until 1999. She then worked as a legal adviser for the state government of Rhineland-Palatinate until 2001, when she became an assistant to constitutional judge Renate Jaeger in Karlsruhe. She worked in Luxembourg as a German representative to the Maison de la Grande Région/Haus der Großregion, a cooperation forum for Luxembourg and neighbouring German, French and Belgian regions, from 2005 to 2006.

From 2007 to 2008, Barley was a judge of the Trier district court and at the Wittlich local court. From 2008 to 2013 she was an adviser on bioethics to the Rhineland-Palatinate State Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection. She left this position when she was elected to Parliament in 2013.

Barley joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1994. In her parliamentary work, Barley represented the constituency of Trier for the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Barley served as a member of the parliament's Council of Elders, which – among other duties – determines daily legislative agenda items and assigning committee chairpersons based on party representation. She was also a member of the parliamentary body in charge of appointing judges to the Highest Courts of Justice, namely the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), the Federal Administrative Court (BVerwG), the Federal Fiscal Court (BFH), the Federal Labour Court (BAG), and the Federal Social Court (BSG). In 2014, she was appointed to serve on the Committee on the Election of Judges (Wahlausschuss), which is in charge of appointing judges to the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. On the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, she served as her parliamentary group's rapporteur on voluntary euthanasia.