Political groups

2009-present: Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats)

National parties

2009-present: Platforma Obywatelska

Biography

Danuta Maria Hübner was born in Nisko, Poland. She received her MSc in Economics from the Warsaw School of Economics in 1971 and her PhD and post-doctoral degree from the same university in 1974 and 1980 respectively. She was a visiting scholar at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Sussex in 1974 and a visiting scholar at Universidad Autonoma in Madrid. From 1988 to 1990, Hübner was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. 

From 1981 to 1987, she was Deputy Director of the Research Institute for Developing Countries at the Warsaw School of Economics. Hübner was also Deputy Director of the Institute for Development and Strategic Studies in Warsaw from 1991 to 1994. In 1992, she was named a Professor of Economics at the Warsaw School of Economics, and she has lectured at California State University and at the Universidad Autonoma in Madrid. From 1991 to 1997, she was Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Ekonomista, a Polish bi-monthly, and, from 1994 until 1997, she was Editor-in-Chief of Gospodarka Narodowa (National Economics), a Polish economics monthly. 

Her political career began in 1992 as Chairwoman of the Polish Central Planning Office, a position she would hold until 1996. She would continue to work in national politics. From 1994 to 1996, Hübner was Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Industry and Trade, where she was responsible for European integration and small and medium-sized enterprises. From 1994 to 1995, she was Advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, co-authoring the Government Programme Strategy for Poland. She was the chief negotiator on Polish accession to the OECD from 1995 to 1996. From 1996 to 1997, Hübner was the State Secretary for European Integration. From 1997 to 1998, she was Minister, Head of the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, and served as his Economic Advisor from 1998-2001. Between 2001 and 2004, she was active in the Committee for European Integration at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, first as State Secretary and later Head of Office. She became Minister for European Affairs for the Polish Government from 2003 to 2004. In this capacity, she was responsible for the accession negotiations between Poland and the EU and represented the Government of Poland to the Convention on the Future of Europe.

EU-Poland meeting in the European Parliament. L-R: Jean-Louis Bourlanges, Jozef Olessky, Danuta Maria Hübner, Jan Truszczyński, Jaroslaw Pietras © European Communities 2002

From 1998 to 2001, she was a member of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, serving as Deputy Executive Secretary in Geneva from 2000 to 2001. From November 1998, Hübner was Deputy Executive Secretary of the European Commission. After the accession of Poland to the EU in 2004, she became a member of the European Commission with responsibility for trade and was appointed Commissioner for Regional Policy, a position she held until 2009.

Since the 2009 European elections, Hübner has been a Member of the European Parliament for Poland, representing the Warsaw Constituency as part of the European People's Party's Group. From 2009 until 2014, she was chair of the Committee on Regional Development and from 2014 until 2019 was the chair of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. She currently serves on the Committee on International Trade and the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and is a substitute of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. From 2009, in addition to her committee assignments, Hübner has been a member of the Parliament's Delegation for relations with the United States, the Delegation to the EU-Mexico Joint Parliamentary Committee, and the Delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly. She is a substitute of the Delegation to the EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, which was set up in 2021.

On 15 September 2010, she joined the Spinelli Group in the European Parliament and was also a member of the European Parliament Intergroup on Sports. From 2014 until 2019, she was a member of the European Parliament's Advisory Committee on the Conduct of Members.

In 2015, Hübner was one of the Parliament's two rapporteurs on a set of proposed changes to EU electoral law that sought to regularize a variety of different electoral systems across the EU. Since 2017, she served on the Parliament's Brexit Steering Group. Between 2006 and 2007, Hübner served as member of the Amato Group, a group of high-level European politicians unofficially working on rewriting the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe into what became known as the Treaty of Lisbon. 

Extraordinary meeting of the European Parliament's Conference of Presidents on State of play of the UK's withdrawal from the EU. L-R: Guy Verhofstadt, Danuta Maria Hübner, Michel Barnier, Pedro Silva Pereira © European Union 2019 - European Parliament 

She is a member of the Scientific Board of the Economic Sciences Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Development and Strategic Studies Institute and the Statistics Council. She was elected three times to the Executive Committee of the European Association of Development Institutes in Geneva.

Amongst the honours she has been awarded are the titles of Officier de l'ordre national de la Légion d'honneur of France, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of Portugal, the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, the Emperor-Maximilian-Prize and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Sussex, Sofia, Camerino, Poznan and Valeciennes.

For more information on her time as an MEP, click here.

What's in the archives

The fonds contain MEP Hübner's speeches and other public interventions during 2009-2013, most of them concerning the regional development, as she was chair of the Committee on Regional Development. The documents illustrating the parliamentary activity of the MEP constitute the majority of files from the archives. In addition, we can find some files regarding the meetings of the Conference of Committee Chairs, from 2014.