Herta Daubler-Gmelin
 Herta Daubler-Gmelin     ( lawyer, academic, politician) | ||||||||||||||
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 Daubler-Gmelin in 1988 | ||||||||||||||
| Born | 12 August 1943 Bratislava, Slovak Republic | |||||||||||||
| Nationality | German | |||||||||||||
| Alma mater | University of Tübingen | |||||||||||||
| Party | Social Democratic Party of Germany | |||||||||||||
Attended Bilderberg 1989 as deputy party chairman of Social Democratic Party of Germany
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Herta Däubler-Gmelin is a German lawyer, academic and politician. She attended the 1989 Bilderberg meeting.
Contents
Background
She was in 1943 born in Bratislava, in the war-time German-allied Slovak Republic, as the daughter of the diplomat Hans Gmelin (d. 1991), SA and NSDAP member and Mayor of Tübingen from 1954 to 1974.
Education
She studied history, economy, law and political science in the [[Universities of Tübingen and Berlin.
Career
Since 1974, she has been admitted as a lawyer, first in Stuttgart, then in Berlin. Since 1992, she has lectured law at the Freie Universität Berlin, which made her an honorary professor in 1995.
Däubler-Gmelin joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1965 and became a member of the Bundestag in 1972, subsequently representing Tübingen from 1998 to 2002. She held several party offices in the 1980s and 1990s, as deputy party chairman from 1988-1997. From 1994–98, she was chairwoman of the working group on legal affairs and legal adviser to the SPD parliamentary group.
In 1993, the SPD nominated Däubler-Gmelin to fill the vacancy of vice-president of the Federal Constitutional Court, but after conservative parliamentary groups blocked the nomination for nine months as being "too political" she abandoned this career step in favor of Jutta Limbach. Ahead of the 1994 elections, SPD chairman Rudolf Scharping included her in his shadow cabinet for the party’s campaign to unseat incumbent Helmut Kohl as Chancellor.[1] During the campaign, Däubler-Gmelin was shadow minister of justice.
Federal Minister of Justice, 1998–2002
From 1998 to 2002, Däubler-Gmelin was Justice Minister in Gerhard Schröder's first cabinet, where she oversaw a number of controversial reform projects such as the change of German citizenship legislation, the introduction of same-sex civil unions, and the overhaul of the German Civil Code, the biggest since its inception in 1900.
Amid the Enron scandal in 2002, Däubler-Gmelin launched a voluntary 12-page corporate governance code that calls on company audit committees to be aware of other business links between the company and its auditors, including consulting work.[2]
On 18 September 2002, four days before Schröder's re-election, she attended a meeting at a restaurant in Derendingen (near Tübingen) with about 30 trade unionists from two local factories (the topic was "Globalization and Labor").[3] After discussion had turned to the preparations for the 2003 invasion Iraq, she remarked that U.S. president Bush was preparing a war to detract from domestic problems such as the economic crisis at the time, and that this was a popular political strategy which had already been used by Adolf Hitler.[3] When some participants showed disagreement, she added immediately that this was not meant to liken Bush to Hitler as a person, but rather to compare their methods, and that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had also used the 1982 Falklands War to improve election prospects.[3]
This was the version published by Schwäbisches Tagblatt, which later stated that Däubler-Gmelin herself had confirmed the wording of the report,[4][5] as well as several present at the meeting.[4][5] Immediately after the article had been published, Däubler-Gmelin strongly denied it, claiming to have been misquoted.[6] She also announced that she would sue the Schwäbische Tagblatt, but later chose not to do so.
She encountered criticism for allegedly expressing "anti-americanism" in both Germany and abroad, including members of the U.S. government such as Ari Fleischer and Condoleezza Rice.[7] On September 20, Däubler-Gmelin called U.S. Ambassador Dan Coats to state that the reports had no basis, and Schröder wrote an apology letter to Bush, stating "there is no place at my cabinet table for anyone who makes a connection between the American president and such a criminal."[7] He did not force her to resign immediately, claiming to trust her denial of the quotation, but she was dropped from his new cabinet when it was formed a few weeks after his narrow re-election.
Later work
From 2002 to 2005 Däubler-Gmelin was chairwoman of the Bundestag's Committee on Consumer Protection and Agriculture, and from 2005 she chaired the Committee for Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid.
Event Participated in
| Event | Start | End | Location(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilderberg/1989 | 12 May 1989 | 14 May 1989 | Spain La Toja Island Galicia | 37th Bilderberg meeting, 110 guests |
References
- ↑ Ferdinand Protzman (August 30, 1994), German Opposition Names Shadow Cabinet in Hopes of Votes New York Times.
- ↑ Silvia Ascarelli and Paul Hofheinz (February 28, 2002), Enron's Collapse Adds to the Push For International Accounting Rules Wall Street Journal.
- ↑ a b c https://web.archive.org/web/20041114082340/http://www.tagblatt.de/index.php?objekt=ST&id=4309
- ↑ a b Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namednetzeitung - ↑ a b https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-gets-apology-for-hitler-remark/
- ↑ http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2002/0921/politik/0015/
- ↑ a b https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2271137.stm
