Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu

Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu (Turkish pronunciation: [mevˌlyt ˈtʃavuʃˌoːɫu]; born 5 February 1968) is a Turkish politician who has been Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey since 24 November 2015; previously he was Minister of Foreign Affairs from August 2014 to August 2015. He is also a member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, where he represents Antalya Province. First elected to Parliament in the 2002 general election, he is a founding member of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). He was the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 2010 to 2012.

Born at Alanya, Çavuşoğlu graduated from Ankara University in 1988 where he studied international relations. He then received a masters in economics from Long Island University in New York, and studied for his doctorate at Bilkent University and was a research fellow at London School of Economics, where he was for a time president of the Turkish Society. He is married with one child.

While serving in parliament, he has chaired the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population. In November 2009, he met the foreign minister of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, in the context of a report that the Assembly is preparing on the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.

Çavuşoğlu joined the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2003 and soon after was named the head of the Turkish delegation and a vice-president of the Assembly. During the January 2010 session of the Assembly, he was nominated and elected on 25 January 2010 to replace outgoing President Lluís Maria De Puig of Spain. In the October reshuffle, this was the reason given for why he did not receive extra responsibilities in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government. His candidacy for this post was supported by all of Turkey's main parties. He became president just months before Turkey took up the chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (November 2010) and at the same time that there was a Turkish president of the Congress of the Council of Europe. In 2012, he was succeeded by France's Jean-Claude Mignon.

Çavuşoğlu was criticized by Hurriyet because of his intervention in the municipality election in Antalya that took place on 30 March 2014. When the opposing party candidate Mustafa Akaydin was ahead of the ruling party candidate, he visited the courthouse with his supporters and interrupted the counting process. After his interruption, counting of votes was stopped. It was claimed that the votes not already counted were from suburbs where the opposing party had more supporters.

On March 11, 2017, Çavuşoğlu was banned from landing in Rotterdam over remarks he had made about the way the Netherlands was treating Turkish emigres. Çavuşoğlu had planned to organize a large gathering to talk about the 2017 Turkish constitutional referendum, in which many Dutch-based emigres can vote. However, the event was deemed unsafe by the Dutch authorities, and Çavuşoğlu was turned away, despite being the Foreign Minister. Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called the Netherlands, "Nazi remnants" and "fascists," which Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called "a crazy remark." Çavuşoğlu followed by defending the Erdoğan's remark and by saying that the Netherlands was the "capital of fascism".