Peter Beyer (politician)

After finishing his Abitur in 1991, Beyer completed his military service in Wuppertal. Beyer then studied law at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Bonn. Furthermore, he attended lectures in History and Politics in Bonn. In 1999 he finished his studies and was admitted to the bar. He subsequently worked at the Cologne office of law firm Mayer Brown.

In 2000 Beyer enrolled in a post-graduate legal studies program at the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville where he completed a Master of Laws in 2001. Returning to Germany, Beyer practiced law at the BEYER Intellectual Property firm in Ratingen. There, he became one of the country's first officially certified intellectual property specialists.[2]

In the federal election on September 27, 2009, Beyer was elected as a Member of the Bundestag. He won his in district "Mettmann II" (consisting of the cities of Heiligenhaus, Ratingen, Velbert und Wülfrath) with a relative majority of 39.8% of the votes.[3]

In the federal election on September 22, 2013, Beyer was re-elected as a Member of the Bundestag, winning his district with a 45.6% relative majority.[4] Currently, he is a member of the Bundestag's Committee on Foreign Affairs, where he serves as his parliamentary group’s rapporteur on transatlantical and the relations with Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia. He is also a member of its Sub-Committee on the United Nations.

In addition to his committee assignments, Beyer has been a member of the German delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) since 2018, where he serves on the Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee) and the Sub-Committee on Crime Problems and the Fight against Terrorism. In this capacity, he is the Assembly’s rapporteur on Kosovo.[5]

Beyer is also a member of the German-American Parliamentary Friendship Group, the Parliamentary Friendship Group for Relations with the States of South-Eastern Europe (Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia) and the Parliamentary Friendship Group for Relations with the States of the Southern Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia).

Since April 2018, Beyer has also been serving as the Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation at the Federal Foreign Office in the fourth coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

• American Chamber of Commerce in Germany (AmCham Germany), Member of the Membership Committee
• Atlantik-Brücke, Member
• Southeast Europe Association (SOG), Member of the Presidium[6]
• The Aspen Institute, Member
• United Europe, Member

In June 2017, Beyer was one of only five members of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group who abstained from a vote on Germany's introduction of same-sex marriage.[7]

In 2019, Beyer joined fellow CDU lawmakers – including Roderich Kiesewetter and Norbert Röttgen – in co-signing an op-ed in Handelsblatt, calling on Chancellor Angela Merkel to keep Chinese telecom company Huawei out of Germany's 5G network, citing national security reasons.[8]

When President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to remove 9,500 troops from Germany in 2020, Beyer called the decision “completely unacceptable, especially since nobody in Washington thought about informing its NATO ally Germany in advance.”[9]

Beyer lives in the German town of Ratingen and has two school-aged children.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Peter Beyer (politician).

• Beyer's official website (mostly German)
• Beyer's biography on the website of the Bundestag (German)