H.E. Miroslav Lajčák

Miroslav Lajčák is Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic. From 2010 to 2012 he was managing director for Europe and Central Asia at the European External Action Service. Before becoming High Representative and EU Special Representative he was Director-General for Political Affairs at the Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has extensive experience in South East Europe, where he is known for his role as mediator and personal representative of the EU’s High Representative for the CFSP, Javier Solana, in which capacity he supervised the 2006 Montenegro independence referendum. Between 2001 and 2005, Ambassador Lajčák was based in Belgrade as Slovakia’s Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Ambassador Lajčák is a law graduate from the Commenius University in Bratislava. He studied international relations at the State Institute of International Relations in Moscow and is also a graduate of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Ambassador Lajčák is fluent in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Bulgarian, English, German and Russian.