Ferenc Mádl - Curriculum vitae #
Ferenc Mádl served as the president of Hungary from 2000-05.
After the fall of communism in 1989, Prime Minister József Antall nominated Mádl as a minister without portfolio, a position in which he served from 1990-93 in the first democratically elected Hungarian government since 1948. In this capacity, he supervised the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and assisted in defining government science policy goals, and closely observed the harmonization of related state tasks and their implementation.
From 1993-94, Mádl served as minister of culture and public education, chair of the Council for Higher Education and Science, and chair of the National Cultural Fund. In 1995, he was the joint presidential candidate of the opposition parties: the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Christian Democratic People’s Party and the Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Party.
In 1992, Mádl formed an inter-portfolio committee to research works of art illegally taken to the former Soviet Union from Hungary during and after World War II with the aim of returning them to Hungary.
Mádl has been a chairman of a number of organizations and committees, including the board of directors of the State Property Agency, the Bank Supervisory Committee, the Scientific Policy Commission, the Human Resources Policy Cabinet, and the Hungarian Civic Cooperation Association. He has also worked as a member of the government scientific advisory body. And served as a member of the Academy of Sciences.
Mádl completed his studies in law at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest in 1955. From 1961-63, he studied at the Faculty of International Comparative Law at Strasbourg University and received a PhD in law in 1974. He was appointed head of the Institute of Civil Law at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the Eötvös Loránd University in 1978.
The author of 20 books and nearly 200 publications, Mádl has lectured at numerous universities abroad as a visiting professor (Source: Emory University).
