Cecilia Malmström

Anna Cecilia Malmström (born 15 May 1968) is a Swedish politician who served as European Commissioner for Trade from 2014 to 2019.

Malmström has been a member of the Swedish Liberals party since the late 1980s, sitting on the party executive since 1997, and was a member of the Västra Götaland Regional Council from 1998 to 2001.

She was a student at the University of Gothenburg from 1992 to 1999, becoming a research assistant (1994).

She then gained a PhD in political science with a thesis titled The Region, the Power and the Glory: Regional Parties in Western Europe (1998), and became a senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg (1998–99).

Her thesis was on regional parties in western Europe, focusing on Catalonia, Spain and Lombardy, Italy.

She has researched and taught in the fields of European politics, regionalism, immigration and terrorism.

Malmström has also worked in Stuttgart and in Barcelona.

She is fluent in Swedish, English, Spanish and French, and has intermediate skills in German and Italian.

She was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Sweden from 1999 to 2006.

She was a member of the Swedish Liberals, part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe until 2023.

Malmström was born in Brännkyrka parish in southern Stockholm and grew up in Gothenburg.

In 1999, Malmström was elected as an MEP for Sweden and she was re-elected again in 2004.

During her tenure she served on the Committees on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and also on the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Subcommittee on Security and Defence.

In 2001, Malmström and nine fellow MEPs – including Nick Clegg and Helle Thorning-Schmidt – founded the Campaign for Parliamentary Reform (CPR) to press for changes to the way the European Parliament functions on a day-to-day basis.

She has also campaigned for greater public access to official documents.

In 2002 she became the Liberal group's spokeswoman on foreign affairs.

She nominated Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá for the Sakharov Prize, which he received from the Parliament in 2002.

During her time as an MEP, Malmström initiated the oneseat.eu web campaign, which aims to make Brussels the permanent seat of the European Parliament.

It was the first such petition to gain one million signatures, a nod to the right of petition under the Treaty of Lisbon.

"We respect the result of the referendum, of course, but still think that one should be able to argue for something one believes in, a lot had changed since the 2003 referendum, Slovenia has joined, Malta and Cyprus are joining at the beginning of next year. Next year, at least two Baltic countries will join. In 2010-11 there could be eight or nine new members. The more members there are, the greater the political price of being outside, because we can't make a difference, Sweden had lost out economically by not joining the single European currency."

She cited a report from the National Board of Trade: "We have lost 100 billion kronor in exports and the same amount in imports. Our trade with the eurozone would have been 13–14 percent greater if we had been members."

In addition, she served as vice-chair of the parliament's delegations to Hungary (before it joined in 2004) and Croatia.

As a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Malmström wrote a critical report on the EU's Russia strategy.

Following the 2006 Swedish elections which saw the victory of the centre-right coalition of Fredrik Reinfeldt, Malmström returned to Sweden to take up the job of Minister for European Affairs in Prime Minister Reinfeldt's cabinet, which took office on 6 October 2006.

In 2007, when Jan Björklund was elected party leader, she was appointed first vice party chairman.

Malmström supports Swedish adoption of the euro currency, and in August 2007 she was one of the politicians calling for another referendum on euro membership (the first was in 2003).

Her responsibilities included institutional issues, review of the EU budget, Baltic Sea Strategy, the Lisbon Strategy and coordinating the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2009.

On 17 November 2009 Malmström was nominated by her government as Sweden's next European Commissioner.

In his nomination, Prime Minister Reinfeldt also said that Carl Bildt, the foreign minister, was not nominated because it was unlikely that a Swede would be appointed to the post of President of the European Council or as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

The President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso offered Malmström the role of Commissioner for Home Affairs, which was created as a result of a liberal demand to split the previous portfolio, which had also included human rights.

Despite this post being security oriented, Commissioner Malmström made clear to the Members of the European Parliament that she would not be a bad cop to the fundamental rights portfolio's good cop.

She previously served as European Commissioner for Home Affairs from 2010 to 2014 and Minister for European Union Affairs from 2006 to 2010.

She was approved by MEPs, and took up the post on 10 February 2010.

One of her first initiatives as a Commissioner of the European Union was to propose a directive advocating stronger sanctions against sexual abuse of children, in which one of the proposals was to create a duty for EU member states to block access to child pornography on the Internet.

Critics interpret that as the creation of a net censorship infrastructure which would not help children, but would indeed be counterproductive and a dangerous threat to democracy.

NGOs working for children's rights, such as Save the Children and NSPCC, have, however, defended the proposal.

Malmström was quickly rewarded with the nickname 'Censilia' on the social web and in – mostly German – dailies, a portmanteau word blending the word "censorship" and her given name ("Cecilia"), in imitation of the "Zensursula" nickname of the German minister Ursula von der Leyen who failed to establish similar filtering techniques in Germany following a decision to prioritize the deletion of illegal websites.

At the same period (March 2010), in pursuit of her efforts to strengthen the safety and security of European citizens, Malmström secured a political agreement between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission to implement Article 10 of the United Nations' Firearms Protocol that combats the trafficking of illicit civilian firearms.

On 11 March 2011, during the Seventh European Day of Remembrance of Victims of Terrorism, at a conference on "The role of Victims of Terrorism in preventing violent radicalization", which was held in Brussels, Malmström gave a speech setting out the devastating effects of terrorism on a personal as well as on a state level, closing with the announcement of the forthcoming (R.A.N.) project (see next paragraph).

In September 2011, Malmström officially launched the Radicalisation Awareness Network (R.A.N.), a project aimed at tackling terrorism and violent extremism through preventive measures, rather than through confrontation.