Cem Özdemir is the Chairman of the German Green Party and a former Member of the European Parliament.

He was born in 1965 in Bad Urach, Germany. He is an educator by profession and gained a degree in social pedagogy at the Evangelical Technical College in Reutlingen, Germany.

Mr. Özdemir joined the Green Party in 1981. In 1994 he was elected to the German Parliament and became its first-ever member of Turkish descent. He served two legislative terms, 1998 to 2002 as Speaker on Home Affairs for his Green Parliamentary Group.

In 2003 Mr. Özdemir was a "Transatlantic Fellow" at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington and in Brussels. In this time, he deepened his knowledge of the transatlantic relationship and drew special comparisons between the ways minority communities organize themselves politically in the United States and in Europe.

Mr. Özdemir was elected to the European Parliament in 2004 (The Greens/European Free Alliance).  He was Co-speaker on Foreign Affairs for his political group, a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and a substitute member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. He was the European Parliament's rapporteur on Central Asia and second vice-chair of the Permanent ad-hoc Delegation for Relations with Iraq. He also served as Vice President of the European Parliament's "CIA Committee" (Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners), whose final report was adopted by the European Parliament in February 2007.

Mr. Özdemir is a charter member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Besides foreign policy his areas of interest include relations between the EU and Turkey, migration and integration policy, as well as Islam in Germany and Europe.