Mihael Brejc

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Mihael Brejc, also known as Miha Brejc (born on 15 November 1947) is a Slovenian politician and Member of the European Parliament. He is a member of the Slovenian Democratic Party.

In 2004, Brejc was elected to the European Parliament. He is part of the European People's Party parliamentary group and serves as member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. He is also vice-chairman of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence, a substitute for the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, member of the delegation for relations with South Africa, and a substitute for the delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly.

[edit] Biography

Miha Brejc was born in Belgrade, then capital of Yugoslavia, to a Slovene family. His father was Tomo Brejc, an influential antifascist left-wing trade unionist who had emigrated from the the Julian March to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 1920s and fought as a partisan in the Yugoslav People's Liberation War. The family moved back to Slovenia when Miha Brejc was still a child. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated in sociology in 1975. He continued his studies at the same university, obtaining a master's degree in 1983 and a PhD in organisational sciences in 1985. He worked as a at the University of Ljubljana since 1988, first as a senior lecturer and later as a professor.

He was one of the founding members of the Social Democratic Union of Slovenia. After the victory of the DEMOS coalition at the first democratic elections in 1990, Brejc was appointed Director of the Slovenian Security and Intelligence Service. He carried out the difficult task of democratization and pluralization of an institution that had served as one of the columns of political opression during Communist times. In 1993, he was dismissed by the then Prime Minister Janez Drnovšek, and returned to academic work.

From 1994 to 1998 he was actively involved in local politics as the Chairman of the Municipal Council of Domžale. During the same period, he also served as the Dean of the High School for Public Administration of the University of Ljubljana. During this time, he advanced several proposals for the reform and modernization of the public administration system in Slovenia.

In 1995 he was elected Vice-President of Social Democratic Party of Slovenia. In 2000, he became the Minister of Labour, Family and Social Affairs in the short-lived centre-right government led by Andrej Bajuk. In 2000, he was elected to the Slovenian Parliament and from 2000 to 2004 he served as Vice-President of the National Assembly of Slovenia.

He is also the chairman of the Slovenia-Taiwan Friendship Association.

His older brother, Tomaž Brejc, is a renowned art critic. His son, Tomo Brejc is a famous photographer and his son-in-law, Gregor Virant is the Minister for Public Administration in Janez Janša's government.