Hans Peter Uhl

Early life and education

After a two-year military service 1964–1966, he studied law, and earned a doctoral degree at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1974. He subsequently joined the civil service of Bavaria. In 1998, he was licensed as an attorney. He is married and has four sons.

Political career

Uhl became a member of the right wing of the CSU in 1970. He was elected to the German Parliament, the Bundestag, in 1998, representing the constituency of West Munich, and was reelected four consecutive terms (in 2002, 2005, 2009 and 2013).

Uhl chaired the parliamentary inquiry committee investigating the German Visa Affair 2005. Between 2005 and 2013, he was spokesman for interior policy of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. In this capacity, he repeatedly rejected efforts to liberalize Germany’s strict rules regarding dual citizenship, arguing that "[it] is a question of loyalty to the German state" and that "individuals with dual nationality, if involved in any criminal activities, can evade the judicial authorities by using their second passport." With regard to proposals for extending voting rights to foreigners, he has argued that such a law would be unconstitutional and that the only reason left-wing parties support the initiative was to expand their own potential electorate to non-EU citizens in Germany as the number of foreigners increases. demanding adjustments to Europe's border-free travel regime, the Schengen Agreement, to allow the re-introduction of border checks under specified conditions. Since 2005, Uhl has been serving as Deputy Chairman of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Friendship Group.

In the context of the 2013 global surveillance disclosures, German news magazine Focus cited Uhl as saying that U.S. contracting companies such as Cisco Systems, which manages much of the German armed forces' data, needed to be required by contract not to pass sensitive material to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). At the same time, Uhl has been a longstanding supporter of using telecommunications data retention by German authorities in order to monitor internet traffic and telephone conversations. With regard to control of internet pages, Uhl referred to China as an example in 2009.

Following the 2013 federal elections, Uhl was part of the CDU/CSU team in the negotiations with the SPD on a coalition agreement.

Since 2014, Uhl has been member of the parliament’s Council of Elders, which – among other duties – determines daily legislative agenda items and assigning committee chairpersons based on party representation. He also serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Sub-Committee for Civilian Crisis Prevention as well as on the Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections, Immunity and the Rules of Procedure. In addition, he represents his parliamentary group in a crossparty committee headed by former defense minister Volker Rühe to review the country’s parliamentary rules on military deployments.

In April 2014, Uhl accompanied the President of the German Parliament Norbert Lammert as well as fellow parliamentarians Marieluise Beck and Niels Annen on a visit to Pakistan, where they met with President Mamnoon Hussain, Chairman of the Senate Nayyar Hussain Bukhari and Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan.

Other activities