Dr Martin Ney

Ambassador Dr Martin Ney is a career diplomat. He holds a doctoral degree in public international law from the University of Würzburg as well as an MA in Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He started his diplomatic career in the Legal Department. From his posting in Thailand he was called back for the negotiations on the external aspects of German unification (the so-called '2+4-Negotiations'), where he acted as legal advisor and chair of the legal committee in the final round. After serving as Executive Assistant to the State Secretary of the German Federal Foreign Office he was posted to Washington as Counsellor for Politico-Military Affairs in 1993 before moving on to Tokyo in 1997.

From 2001 to 2005 he was the European Correspondent of the German Federal Foreign Office coordinating the German input to the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU. In 2005 he was appointed Ambassador and Senior Deputy High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. From 2007 till 2010 he served as Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Germany to the United Nations in New York. He served as the Legal Adviser of the German Federal Foreign Office before being appointed Ambassador to India in 2015. Since 2019 he has been Germany's Ambassador to Portugal.

Dr Ney has been a member of the Tönissteiner Kreis since 1984; he is a former Young Leader of the Atlantik-Bruecke/American Council on Germany, and a member of the Atlantik-Brücke e.V. Since 2015 he has been on the Advisory Council of Bucerius USA. In 2018 he was appointed as an Honorary Fellow of Merton.

Dr Ney is an avid sailor and an accomplished flautist, having performed repeatedly as a soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of the Frankfurt Opera, with the Nuremberg Philharmonic in the General Assembly of the UN, and with the Symphony Orchestra of India. He is married, and has two sons and two grandchildren.