The SPD politician Niels Annen According to the will of the Federal Government, he should become the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Federal Cabinet nominated the 51-year-old foreign and development expert at its meeting on Wednesday for the top position at the UN refugee agency UNHCR, a spokesman for the Foreign Office said. Annen is currently Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry for Development, and was previously Minister of State in the Foreign Office.
The post of High Commissioner for Refugees has been held by Italian Filippo Grandi since 2016. He is in his second term of office, which ends at the end of 2025. Germany is currently the second largest contributor to the UNHCR.
Annen, who was born in Hamburg, was first elected to the Bundestag in 2005. He is considered a close confidant of Chancellor Wolfgang Schmidt and Chancellor Olaf Scholz (both SPD). He recently announced that he would not run for the Bundestag again.
Annen was chairman of the SPD youth organization Jusos from 2001 to 2004. From 2003 to 2019 he was a member of the SPD party executive committee. After studying in Hamburg, Madrid, Berlin and the USA, he was a consultant for international policy analysis at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation from 2011 to 2013, then foreign policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag until 2018. This was followed by posts as Minister of State in the Foreign Office (2018 to 2021) and as Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry for Development (since December 2021).
The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, founded in 1950, monitors compliance with the Geneva Refugee Convention. It has over 20,000 employees in more than 130 countries. The UNHCR provides emergency aid on site and ensures, among other things, that refugees have access to education and health care. (AFP)
