Topic: Radoslaw Sikorski

Radosław Sikorski ( listen) (born 23 February 1963 in Bydgoszcz), is a conservative Polish politician and journalist. Currently he is the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.

Sikorski was much involved in the Solidarity social movement in the late 1970s, and chaired the student strike committee in Bydgoszcz in March 1981. After martial law was declared in his homeland in December 1981, he fled to Britain, which granted him asylum the following year. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Pembroke College, University of Oxford; while there, he was a member of the all-male drinking club The Bullingdon Club, whose members then included the current leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, and current Mayor of London Boris Johnson. He then worked as a freelance journalist. In 1984, he took British citizenship. In the mid-1980s, Sikorski worked as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola. For a photograph taken in Afghanistan he won the World Press Photo prize in 1988. From 1990 he was an advisor to Rupert Murdoch on investments in Poland.

Returning to Poland, in 1992 he briefly became deputy defence minister in the Jan Olszewski government. From 1998 to 2001 he served as deputy minister of foreign affairs in the Jerzy Buzek government. During the latter appointment, Sikorski became notorious in the Polish expatriate community, Polonia, for designing and promoting a particularly strict policy regarding Polonia's citizenship status in Poland. As a result of that policy, Poland refused to recognize the acquired citizenships of Polish emigrants, including hundreds of thousands of recent refugees from Communism and their children, and insisted that they be subject to all obligations of Polish citizenship, while at the same time making it impossible to renounce such citizenship because of an extremely cumbersome administrative procedure. This policy became known as the "passport trap" because it was mainly implemented as harassment of departing travellers (primarily citizens of the United States, Canada, and Australia) who were prevented from leaving Poland until they obtained a Polish passport.