Omid Nouripour is a German politician of the Alliance '90/The Greens who currently serves as a member of the Bundestag, representing the state of Hesse. He is his party's spokesman on foreign affairs, and is a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and a deputy member of the Defence Committee. He is of Iranian background and moved to Germany as a child.
Early life and education
Nouripour was born in Tehran. In 1988, aged 13, Nouripour immigrated to Frankfurt, West Germany, with his family. He studied German, political science, law, sociology, philosophy and economics at the University of Mainz, but did not earn a degree. In 2002, he became a German citizen. Because Iran does not allow its citizens to relinquish their citizenship, that country considers him an Iranian citizen as well. He is a native speaker of Persian and fluent in German and English.
Political career
Nouripour was elected to the German Federal Parliament in 2006 as the second member of Iranian descent, taking the vacated seat of the former Foreign MinisterJoschka Fischer. Between 2006 and 2013, Nouripour was a member of the Defence Committee and the Budget Committee, where he served as his parliamentary group's rapporteur on the budgets of the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Ministry of Health, the Federal Court of Auditors and the Office of the Federal President. Since 2014, Nouripour has been a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. He also served on the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid from 2014 until 2017. He has written widely on migration and is the speaker of the Green Party on migration issues and refugees. In July 2015, Nouripour joined Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on a trip to Cuba. It was the first time a German foreign minister had visited Cuba since the German reunification in 1990. Nouripour he has been chairman of the German-Ukrainian Parliamentary Friendship Group since 2018. Already since 2014, he has also been serving as deputy chairman of the German-US Parliamentary Friendship Group and the German-Indian Parliamentary Friendship Group.
Political positions
Military procurement
In 2011, Nouripour accused the aerospace companyEADS of strong-arming European governments into agreeing to fund the Airbus A400M Atlas by falsely suggesting the Franco-German-led company might otherwise collapse.
Speaking on the 2012 Bahraini uprising, Nouripour commented that “s the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is supporting the state-repression inside Bahrain, Iran acts as the protector of the Shia.” In a study sent to the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle in May 2012, Nouripour and Hans-Josef Fell proposed that Germany should help Iran expand renewable energy sources to solve the conflict over the nation’s nuclear program and prevent a war in the region. Under the umbrella of the German parliaments’ sponsorship program for human rights activists, Nouripour has been raising awareness for the work of the persecuted Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh since 2012. When Turkey formally asked NATO in November 2012 to set up missiles on its border with Syria due to growing concern about spillover from the civil war, Nouripour warned against Germany and NATO "letting themselves be drawn into the Syria conflict with no basis in international law." However, he later voted for posting two German Patriot missile batteries to help bolster security along Turkey's border with Syria in the context of the NATO-backed operation Active Fence in 2015. For years Nouripour opposed listing the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. However, after the 2012 Burgas bus bombing, he stated that “it’s now time to isolate Hezbollah.” In May 2014 and February 2016, Nouripour visited the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the Syrian civil war that had been going on since 2011.
Relations with the African continent
Nouripour has in the past voted in favor of German participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions as well as in United Nations-mandated European Union peacekeeping missions on the African continent, as for example in Darfur, Sudan, South Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic, and Liberia. On Somalia, Nouripour has a mixed voting record. He has supported Operation Atalanta but for a period of time regularly abstained from votes on extending the mandate for the mission. He also voted against German participation in EUTM Somalia, and abstained in 2015. After reports in 2010 that the German company Asgaard had signed a deal with a Somali warlord to provide security services, Nouripour accused the German government of not doing enough in the past to regulate private security firms.
