ALDE President Hans van Baalen to Attend Our Party Congress

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - A special guest at the Congress of Our Party, to be held tomorrow in Sarajevo, will be the President of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, Hans van Baalen (Johannes Cornelis van Baalen), Our Party announced.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) is a European political party that brings together parties of liberal, democratic and reformist principles from 30 European countries, and a member of this European party, better known by the acronym „ALDE“, is also Our Party.

Van Baalen has been a member of the Dutch liberal party VVD since 1986, served as its international secretary and its representative in the parliament of the Kingdom of the Netherlands for three terms (1999-2009). During his ten years in the Dutch parliament, he was a member of parliamentary committees for foreign affairs, European affairs and defence, making him a long-standing expert on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Southeast Europe. Additionally, he represented his country in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Since 2009, he has been a Member of the European Parliament and is publicly perceived as one of the most influential figures in the ALDE party and the European Parliament. This is evidenced by the fact that he is a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Security and Defence, which are among the most significant bodies of the EP. He chairs the EP delegation for relations with South Africa and previously served on delegations for relations with Afghanistan, the United States of America and Japan.

He was a member of the European Parliament monitoring mission during the parliamentary elections in Ukraine in 2014. During the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, he advocated for greater military spending and NATO engagement, as well as increasing Ukraine's prospects for joining the European Union, for which he was placed on the blacklist of prominent EU individuals banned from entering the Russian Federation.

Van Baalen has been President of the ALDE party since November 2015. ALDE advocates for a free market, European integration and a single European market. It comprises 65 political parties from 42 European countries, and Our Party joined it in 2016.

In addition to his political engagement through the VVD and ALDE, Hans van Baalen was also President of the Liberal International from 2009 to 2014, an international organisation that brings together liberal parties, politicians and intellectuals with the aim of promoting liberalism, democracy, human rights, free market, social justice, tolerance and international solidarity.