Jakub Kulhánek was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic on 21 April 2021. In his career so far, he has focused primarily on international relations and security. Prior to heading the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he worked for almost three years at the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic as a Deputy Member of the Government. He also worked as a deputy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and previously also at the Ministry of Defence. Prior to that, he worked as an advisor to the Vice-President of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Mr Kulhánek has also been active in several professional institutions both in the Czech Republic and abroad. In 2012, he worked as a researcher at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Brussels. In addition to the Association for International Affairs in Prague, where as a researcher from 2007 to 2012 he led the Eastern European programme, he completed internships at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and the Euroasian Strategy Project.
Mr Kulhánek holds a master's degree from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington DC and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague. He was born in 1984 in Mělník. He lives with his family in Prague.
To mark the Freedom Online Coalition’s (FOC) 10th anniversary, Finland, as the Chair, is organising a virtual FOC 10th Anniversary Ministerial Meeting on 3 December 2021, hosted by Pekka Haavisto, the Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs. The Ministerial, the culmination of Finland’s FOC Chairship, is an important opportunity to raise the visibility of the Coalition and to set the FOC's goals and vision for the 2020s.