Heidi Hautala

Heidi Anneli Hautala (born 14 November 1955) is a Finnish politician and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Finland.

She is a member of the Green League, part of the European Green Party.

She is currently a Member of the European Parliament for the fifth time.

Hautala was born in the northern Finnish city of Oulu in 1955.

Her father was a high-ranking war-hero who later went on to become one of the region’s most powerful bankers.

Hautala holds a master's degree in horticulture.

She speaks Finnish, English, Swedish, German, French and some Russian.

Hautala was the leader of the Finnish Green Party from 1987 to 1991, and a presidential candidate in 2000 and 2006.

She was a member of the national parliament from 1991 to 1995.

Previously she held the post from 1995 to 2003 and 2009 to 2011 when she chaired the Subcommittee on Human Rights 2009–2011.

After Finland joined the European Union (EU) in 1995, Hautala was elected to the European Parliament.

Between 1998 and 1999, she served as chair of the Committee on Women's Rights.

She later led the Greens–European Free Alliance in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2002, alongside Paul Lannoye.

After less than two years on the assembly’s influential environment committee, Hautala was chosen to steer a highly sensitive proposal for a Fuel Quality Directive through the parliament.

As a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs between 1999 and 2003, Hautala participated in the negotiations to increase openness in the EU.

In 2001, she successfully took the Council of the European Union to the European Court of Justice over access to a document on arms export rules.

The Court ruled that the ministers should have considered publishing at least part of the document.

The so-called "Hautala case" set a precedent in European law for access to documents.

In 2002, Hautala led a campaign for the European Parliament to set up a public register of members’ assistants.

Between 2002 and 2003, Hautala was the president of the European Parliament Intergroup on Public Health.

Hautala returned to the national Parliament in the elections of 2003.

Hautala was the chair of the Administrative Council of Neste Oil, a Finnish oil refining and marketing company producing mainly transportation fuels and other refined petroleum products.

She works closely with EU affairs as a member of the Grand Committee.

In addition, she chaired the Green parliamentary group and was the Chair of the Legal Affairs Committee in the Finnish Parliament.

Also she was a member of the Parliament's Speaker's Council, as well as the chair of the National Equality Commission (TANE).

She advocates environmental responsibility, openness in politics, and global justice.

In the first round of the 2006 election, Hautala finished fourth of the eight candidates with a vote share of 3.5% (105,248 votes).

In 2009, Hautala was re-elected to the European Parliament, where she served as chair of the Subcommittee on Human Rights and as member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Hautal became well-known for promoting transparency in the EU after winning the case against the Council on access to documents on arm trade, known as the Hautala Case T-14/98.

Hautala is a signatory of the 2010 Declaration on Crimes of Communism, a patron of its preceding conference, and was a member of the Reconciliation of European Histories Group as an MEP.

Hautala was nominated the minister of international development and state ownership to Jyrki Katainen's government in 2011.

In 2013 it emerged Hautala had hired cleaning lady and repair work without taking care of the employer payments.

She agreed to pay the contributions and apologised for her actions, and resigned from the ministerial working group against the informal economy.

Later, she promoted the service Palkkaus.fi service that was inspired by her: the service intends to make it easy for private employers to handle all the employer payments through a website.

Hautala resigned from her development and state ownership steering minister position in October 2013 amidst of allegations of abuse of power.

In a protest against Arctic ice drilling a year earlier, members of Greenpeace boarded without authorization on the multipurpose icebreakers Fennica and Nordica operated by the state-owned company Arctia Shipping under contract to the Royal Dutch Shell.

Hautala's office had recommended that the company withdraw its criminal complaint against Greenpeace, and threatened to fire the management in case that they disobliged.

When Iltalehti first broke the story, Hautala initially offered a different account of the events, denying that her office had pressured the company.

She has been the Vice-President of the European Parliament since 2017.

She served as minister for international development and ownership steering issues in Jyrki Katainen's cabinet.