Jacek Czaputowicz

Jacek Krzysztof Czaputowicz (born 30 May 1956 in Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish politician and academic who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland from 9 January 2018 to 20 August 2020.

Education

In the years 1980-1983 Czaputowicz studied geography at the University of Warsaw, in 1986 he graduated from the Faculty of Economics of the Warsaw Central of Planning and Statistics. In the years 1992–1993 he was a member of the Foreign Service Programme at the University of Oxford. In 1997, he received a doctorate in political science at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He obtained his habilitation at the University of Warsaw in 2008. In 2016 he was appointed by the Polish President as a professor of social sciences. He is an academic lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Warsaw.

Anti-communist activities

In 1978 Czaputowicz collaborated with the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and the Students' Solidarity Committee in Warsaw. in the years 1978-1980 he ran a library of underground publications. He was arrested several times for independent activity. In September 1980, he was one of the founders of the Independent Students' Association (NZS). He was imprisoned on 13 December 1981 and released in November 1982; then he became involved in the activity of the underground NZS. In April 1985 he became one of the founders of the Freedom and Peace Movement (WiP). For his activity at the WiP, he was imprisoned in February 1986. He was released in September 1986 under amnesty. He coordinated the WiP's foreign relations and maintained contacts with the democratic opposition in the GDR, Czechoslovakia and Hungary and was one of the initiators and signatories of the Helsinki Memorandum.