Ivan Gasparovic
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Ivan_gasparovic.jpg
Ivan Gašparovič (born March 27 1941), Slovak politician and law professor, became President of Slovakia on June 15, 2004.
Gašparovič was born in Poltár, near Lučenec and Banská Bystrica in south-central Slovakia. His father, Vladimir Gašparović, migrated to Slovakia from Rijeka, Croatia at the end of World War I. Vladimir was a teacher at a gymnasium (secondary school) in Bratislava, and at one point its headmaster.
Gašparovič studied at the Law Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava, which is the central university in Slovakia, from 1959 to 1964. He worked in the District Prosecutor's Office of the district of Martin (1965-66), then became a Prosecutor at the Municipal Prosecutor's Office of Bratislava (1966-68). In 1968 he joined the Communist Party of Slovakia to support Alexander Dubček's reforms, but he was deprived of his party membership after the Warsaw Pact invasion in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (see History of Czechoslovakia).
From 1968 to July 1990 Gašparovič was a teacher at the Department of Criminal Law, Criminology and Criminological Practice at the Law Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava. In February 1990 he became prorector (vice-chancellor) of Comenius University.
After the fall of the Communist regime through the Velvet Revolution he was chosen by Václav Havel to become prosecutor-general of Czechoslovakia based in Prague, from July 1990 to March 1992, which was a period of political tensions of Czechoslovakia. After March 1992, he was briefly Vice-President of the Legislative Council of Czechoslovakia, before Czechoslovakia ceased to exist in January 1993. He was also temporarily again a teacher at the Comenius University Law Faculty. He was a member of the Scientific Council of the Comenius University and of the Scientific Council of the Law Faculty of that university. In late 1992, he was one of the authors of the Constitution of Slovakia.
From 1992 to July 12 2002 Gašparovič was a member of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (MDS), the party led by the controversial Vladimír Mečiar. From June 1992 to September 2002, he was a member of the Slovak parliament (the National Council of the Slovak Republic), first within Czechoslovakia then in independent Slovakia, and until October 1998 he was Speaker of the Parliament.
From October 1998 to 15 July 2002, when his MDS was an opposition party, Gašparovič was a member of the parliamentary Committee for the Supervision of the SIS (the Slovak equivalent of CIA). He was also a member of the delegation of the Slovak parliament in the Interparliamentary Union.
In July 2002, Gašparovič left the MDS, together with some other members. This happened a short time before the September parliamentary elections. The reason were internal disputes within the party, or as he puts it, a "protest against the undemocratic way the party is led by Vladimír Mečiar." On July 12, he founded the Movement for Democracy, a new opposition party, and became its leader.
In the September 2002 elections his party polled 3.3 percent, not enough to win seats in the parliament. After the elections, Gašparovič returned to the Law Faculty of the Comenius University and wrote several university textbooks as well as working papers and studies on criminal law.
In April 2004 Gašparovič ran for President against Mečiar, who was attempting to make a comeback after losing the 2002 legislative elections. Although Mečiar won more votes than Gašparovič in the first round, he did not win a majority. In the second round, Gašparovič polled nearly 60 percent of the vote after receiving the support of the eliminated candidates (see Slovakia presidential election, 2004).
Private life
In 1964, Gašparovič married Silvia Beníková, with whom he has two children. In his private life, he is a sports fan, mainly of ice hockey, which is the national sport of Slovakia. He was one of the leaders of the hockey club Slovan ChZJD (later called HC Slovan Bratislava). He was vice-president of the International Commission of the Czechoslovak Ice Hockey Union and vice-president of the hockey team of the sports unit Slovan Bratislava.
See also
- List of political parties in Slovakia
- List of Presidents of Slovakia
- List of leaders of Slovak parliaments
- Slovakia presidential election, 2004
- Silvia Gasparovicova
External links
- Template:Sk icon campaign website (http://www.gasparovic.sk/cv.html)
- Official website (http://www.prezident.sk/?introduction)de:Ivan Gašparovič
eo:Ivan GAŠPAROVIČ fr:Ivan Gašparovič gl:Ivan Gašparovič pl:Ivan Gašparovič sk:Ivan Gašparovič sv:Ivan Gašparovic