Catherine Ashton

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Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, (born 20 March 1956 at Upholland, Lancashire) is a British Labour politician who served as the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and First Vice President of the European Commission in the Barroso Commission from 2009 to 2014. Her political career began in 1999 when she was created a Life Peer as "Baroness Ashton of Upholland, of St Albans, in the County of Hertfordshire" by Tony Blair's Labour Government.

She became the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills in 2001 and subsequently in the Ministry of Justice in 2004.

She was appointed a Privy Councillor in May 2006. Ashton became Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council in Gordon Brown's first Cabinet in June 2007.

She was instrumental in steering the EU's Treaty of Lisbon through the UK Parliament's upper chamber.

In 2008, she was appointed as the British European Commissioner and became the Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission.In December 2009, she became the inaugural High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy that was created by the Treaty of Lisbon.

As High Representative, Ashton served as the EU's foreign policy chief.

Despite being criticised by some, particularly at the time of her appointment and in the early stages of her term of office, for her limited previous experience of international diplomacy, Ashton subsequently won praise for her work as a negotiator in difficult international situations, in particular for her role in bringing Serbia and Kosovo to an agreement in April 2013 that normalised their ties, and in the P5+1 talks with Iran which led to the November 2013 Geneva interim agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme.In January 2017, Ashton became Chancellor of the University of Warwick, succeeding Sir Richard Lambert and becoming Warwick's first female chancellor.

Personal life

Catherine Ashton was born at Upholland, Lancashire, on 20 March 1956. She comes from a working-class family, with a background in coal mining.

She attended Upholland Grammar School in Billinge Higher End, Lancashire, then Wigan Mining and Technical College, Wigan. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology in 1977 from Bedford College, London (now part of Royal Holloway, University of London). She was the first person in her family to attend university.

Ashton lives in St Albans with her husband, Peter Kellner, the former president of the online polling organisation, YouGov. Ashton and Kellner have been married since 1988. Ashton has two children and three stepchildren.

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Career

Ashton served with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) as an administrator from 1977 to 1983, and later as one of its vice chair. She was the business manager of the Coverdale Organisation, a management company, from 1979 to 1981.

She worked for the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work in 1983. She served as the Director of Business in the Community from 1983 to 1989, assisting businesses in tackling injustice, and she founded the Employers' Forum on Disability, Opportunity Now, and the Windsor Fellowship. She was mainly a freelance policy advisor in the 1990s for the majority of the 1990s. She served as the head of the Health Authority in Hertfordshire from 1998 to 2001, and as Vice President of the National Council for One-Parent Families, she served as Vice President.

Baroness Ashton of Upholland was the first woman to head Labour Life Peer in 1999, under Prime Minister Tony Blair's leadership. She was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Education and Skills in June 2001. She was appointed Minister in 2002 by Sure Start in the same department, and in September 2004, she was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department of Constitutional Affairs, with responsibilities including the National Archives and the Public Guardianship Office. In 2006, Ashton was elected to the Privy Council, and she was elected Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the new Ministry of Justice in May 2007.

By the House magazine and "Peer of the Year" by Channel 4, she was named "Minister of the Year" by the year and "Peer of the Year" by the year. In 2006, she received the "Politician of the Year" award at the annual Stonewall Awards, which were given to those who had a positive impact on British LGBT people's lives.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown named Ashton as the Head of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council on June 28th. She was responsible for steering the Lisbon Treaty through the Upper House as the House's Chief.

Ashton was nominated by the United Kingdom on October 3rd to replace Peter Mandelson as the European Commissioner for Trade. Since European commissioners can not serve in another capacity during their term of office, whether wealthy or not, she used the procedural system that was first introduced in 1984 and then withdrew her Lordship but not her seat.

Ashton led the EU delegation in a deal with South Korea that ended virtually all tariffs between the two countries (May 2009) and represented the EU in a long-running dispute over banana imports, mainly between Latin America and the EU.

Ashton was elected the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on November 19, 2009. Her appointment was confirmed at a summit in Brussels by 27 European Union leaders. Gordon Brown, who had initially called for former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to become President of the European Council, has since agreed that the position of High Representative will be granted to a British citizen.

Ashton's relative anonymity prior to her appointment led to a remark in the media. According to the Guardian newspaper, her appointment as High Representative had been received with a "cautious welcome" from foreign relations experts. She was described as a virtual unknown with paltry political experience, lacking no foreign-policy experience, and never having been elected to anything, according to the Economist. The journal lauded her for leading the Lisbon Treaty through the House of Lords, steering the European Commission's Trade Portfolio without ambiguity with her colleagues, and being able to consensus-building.

Critics expected that she would be out of her depth. In The Daily Telegraph, Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation, who is on record as opposed to a European Union role in foreign and security policy, wrote, "This may be the most absurd appointment in EU history." Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative MEP, argued she had "no expertise" in trade issues at a time when the EU is embroiled in pivotal talks with Canada, Korea, and the WTO. The Guardian referred to an anonymous Whitehall source as saying, "Cathy just got lucky..." Her and Herman Van Rompuy European Council president was a disgrace." They are no more than garden gnomes."

"I have seen Cathy in action," former Home Secretary Charles Clarke said. I have utter respect for her. She is an excellent negotiator and has a knack for building good relationships with people. "People underestimate Cathy at their peril," Shami Chakrabarti, the head of Liberty, a human rights pressure group, said. She is not a strong bruiser. She is both a persuader and a charmer. That is the key to her triumph.

Ashton was approved by the Parliament on October 22, 2008, by 538 to 40 votes, with 63 abstentions. Following a confirmation hearing by the Trade Committee of the European Parliament, Ashton was accepted by the Parliament on October 22 by 538 to 40 votes, with 63 abstentions. On December 1, 2009, she took office for a five-year term.

In the 2015 New Year Honours List for services to the European Common Foreign and Security Policy, she was named Dame Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG).

Notable events of her term included:

Serbia and Kosovo's governments signed an agreement in April 2013 to normalize their relations after two years of talks. Although Serbia did not officially recognize Kosovo as an independent state, it did "in effect" that the government in Pristina has legal jurisdiction over the entire territory, including Serb-majority areas of northern Kosovo. Kosovo promised to give four Serb-majority areas a certain degree of autonomy in return. The deal, which, among other things, removed barriers to Serbia and Kosovo joining the European Union, was followed by Ashton's mediation of ten rounds of negotiations between Serbia's Prime Minister Ivica Dacic and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci. Ashton and her fellow negotiators Dacic and Thaci were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a cross-party committee of the US House of Representatives. In the European Parliament, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats received a similar vote.

The Financial Times announced that Ashton was "no longer the diplomatic dilettante" after talks on an interim deal with Iran over its nuclear program in November 2013. "I tip my hat to her" a senior French diplomat was quoted as saying, "She played a decisive part." The study continued to state that after initially insisting on only talking with other foreign ministers, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif "now... wanted to deal only with Lady Ashton." "That the others consented to this was significant," a western diplomat said. It was surprising for China and Russia to be outside while negotiating terms in the room.

Ashton visited Kyiv in December 2013. "determination of Ukrainians protesting for their country's European perspective," she said, "with sadness" that police used force to exclude peaceful citizens from Kyiv's downtown center. A dialogue with political parties and culture as well as the use of arguments is always more convincing than the argument of force." Russian deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin criticized Ashton's categorisation of the anti-government demonstrations in Kyiv as nonviolent in character, pointing to the deaths of a number of police officers.

A video of a conversation between Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet was released at the start of March. Paet said in the call that he had been told by a woman doctor named Olga that the snipers responsible for the killings of police and civilians in Kyiv last month were protester provocateurs rather than supporters of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. "I didn't know... Gosh," Ashton says. "There's a growing and keener sense that the snipers were not Yanukovych, it was someone from the new coalition," Paet says. Ashton replies: "I think we do want to look into it." I didn't pick that up, but it's cool. "Gosh," she says. The Estonian foreign ministry confirmed the truth of the leak but later stated that "Foreign Minister Paet was giving an overview of what he had heard in Kyiv and expressed worry about the situation on the ground." We refute the argument that Paet was giving an account of the opposition's involvement in the violence. "Dr. Olga Bogomolets, a female doctor, told The Globe and Mail that in a chat with Estonian minister Julia Lang that "he did not say that protesters used snipers." Demonstrators fired in the head and heart as she told the Estonian minister what she saw that day. "I saw people who were killed by snipers but only on [protesters'] side.'

"I strongly condemn the efforts of Right Sector activists who have surrounded the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine's building on March 28." Ashton issued a news release on March 28, 2014 condemning violence by members of the Ukrainian nationalist political party Right Sector. Such coercion of the parliament would go against [the] rule of law and [the] rule of law. I have urged the Right Sector and other groups in Ukraine not to use or threaten violence. They must notify the police immediately if they have been handed over any unauthorised arms."

On November 12, 2012, President Putin signed the new treason bill. Ashton expressed reservations about the new bill, "potentially penalizing contacts with foreign nationals with up to 20 years in jail" and lowering "the burden of proof for accusations of treason and espionage." The United Nations Human rights organs said that the new legislation would not prohibit the dissemination of information about the human rights situation in Russia. According to Ashton, the inspection wave in Russia in March 2013 seemed to be aimed at "undermining civil society operations."

On August 14, 2013, Ashton condemned Egyptian security forces' "disproportionate" use of force, killing over 1000 protesters in Cairo's Raba al-Adawiya and al-Nahda squares.

Members of the European Parliament questioned Ashton about her role as national treasurer in the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s, amid protests by the opposition that it may have had financial ties to the Soviet Union. Ashton said she had not obtained any "direct funds from communist countries." She said that a large portion of the organization's funds had been "collected in buckets" at marches and marches, and that she was the first to order an investigation of CND's finances. "She never went to the Soviet Union, had no links with the Soviet Union, and she never accepted money from Soviet sources," she said.

Ashton was chastised within the EU for failing to visit Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake in February. A number of defence ministers reportedly protested that she had not attended a European Defence Summit in Majorca. Senior officials in her organization were reported to have remarked that she was only interested in "generalities" rather than generalities. Ashton ridiculed a rumors that she switched off her phone after 8 p.m. every day.

Ashton received the lowest mark in a survey that rated the work of European Commissioners in February 2011. The questionnaire, which was commissioned by lobbying and PR firm Burson-Marsteller, asked 324 Brussels policy-makers to assign a letter of A to E (A being the highest). Ashton was given an A for her work, being the only Commissioner to be given a letter below D.

In March 2012, Israeli politicians chastised Ashton for comparing the shooting of Jewish children in Toulouse to Gaza's. "When we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we recall what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is going on in Syria, we remember young people and children who have lost their lives," Ashton told Palestinian youths at a UNRWA function. Israeli politicians condemned her for equating the deaths of three children and a rabbi in the Gaza shooting as if she had not been quoted in the media as not having mentioned the Israeli city of Sderot. Her spokesperson said that her remark had been "grossly distorted" and that she had also mentioned Israeli victims in Sderot, but that had been deleted from the original transcript.

In reaction to earlier criticism of Ashton for not traveling enough, the Daily Telegraph chastised her for not being in Brussels for sufficient European Commission meetings, noting that Ashton had missed 21 out of 32 regular weekly meetings held so far this year. According to the paper's complaint that Ashton's absences were "leaving Britain without a voice" at such meetings, commissioners serve as representatives not of individual member states but of the European interest. Ashton's employees also referred to her personal involvement in nuclear talks with Iran as one of the international obligations that had barred her from Commission meetings.

Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, Poland's Foreign Minister, said in 2011 that Ashton's criticism was "a lot of hot air" and that "she has an impossible job to do and she's doing it well." People will be more optimistic about what she has done at the end of her time in office. She will leave a lasting mark."

Ashton was said in February 2010 to be furious over "latent sexism" among some of her European peers that fueled some of her critiques. She told the world that her work was often interrupted by a lack of funding for her. For example, she is not provided with her own aeroplane, which is something taken for granted by the United States. Secretaries of State.

The tone of public opinion on Ashton's in office was later to be influenced in part by her contributions to talks over Kosovo and Iran. Der Spiegel wrote about her in October 2013.

One of Ashton's detractors had to admit to her office's ineffectiveness. Peter Oborne, the chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, wrote in September 2013: "i""s chief political commentator."

As debates regarding Ashton's replacement, Paul Taylor of Reuters wrote in The New York Times in July 2014 as part of a larger discussion of appointments to the European Commission: a political analysis of appointments to the European Commission.

Adam Boulton, a journalist who was reflecting on her work, died in July 2014 in the UK's Sunday Times's Sunday Times: reflecting on her achievements.

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