User:Canaan9801/Teodoro Ribera

Teodoro Javier Ribera Neumann (May 25, 1958 - ) is a Chilean constitutional lawyer, academic, and politician. He his the current Chilean Minister of Foreign Affairs.

From 1990 to 1998, he served as a deputy for the 51st District and was a Justice Minister for President Sebastián Piñera from 2011 to 2012. He also served as Rector of the Autonomous University of Chile from 1998 to 2011 and again from 2015 to 2019. On June 13, 2019, he was named Minister of Foreign Affairs in Piñera's second government, succeeding Roberto Ampuero.

Academic and Legal Career
Ribera completed his primary and secondary educatio in the Colegio Aléman in his home city of Temuco. He studied law at the University of Chile. Ribera later received a scholarship to pursue a doctorate at the Julius Maximilian University of Wurzburg in Germany, where he gained a doctorate of both laws and graduated magna cum laude. Later he became a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and the Political Science Institute at the University of Chile.

In 1998 he was named rector of the Autonomous University of Chile. and became a professor of Constitutional Law in the Law Department of the University of Chile. In 2006 he was named the first abogado integrante, a lawyer with the ability to substitute for a member of an Appeals Court of the Surpeme Court of Chile for the Constitutional Court of Chile, a position he would hold until 2009.

In July 2011, after 13 years as rector of the Autonomous University of Chile, he resigned in order to become the Minsiter of Justice of Chile.

Currently, he is an adjunct professor in the Law Department at the University of Chile and professor at the Autonomous University of Chile.

Ribera is an author of many academic publications of international and constitutional law in Chile, Germany, Romania, Peru, Paraguay and Argentina.

Political Career
In 1986, after completing his doctorate in Germany and gaining his doctor juris utriusque degree, he became an advisor for the then-Minister of the Interior, Ricardo García, on the development of laws on political parties, the popular vote, and vote counting. In 1987, he returned to Germany as a Legal Advisor for the Chilean Embassy in Bonn, where he would work until July 1988. He was decorated by the German government for his support of Chilean-German relations. In 1989, Ribera joined the National Renewal Party and in 1990 was elected as Deputy for the 51st district. He was reelected in 1993 to serve a second term, completing it in 1998. As deputy, he was a member of the Committees on the Constitution; Legislation and Justice; and Foreign Relations, Interparliamentary Affairs and Latin American Integration. In addition, he was a member of the Special Commisions on Indigenous Peoples and Equality of Religion in Chile. He was chosen to represent Chile before the World Parliamentary Organization and additionally was President of the Chilean-Romanian Binational Parliamentary Group and Vice President of the Chilean-German Binational Parliamentary Group. He was Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies from March 14, 1995 - March 19, 1996, being the second center-right parliamentarian and the first from the National Renewal Party to hold this position.

In the parliamentary election of 1997, depsite obtaining a plurality in his district, Ribera lost his seat through the application of the Binomial system of voting; Eugenio Tuma Zedán of the Party for Democracy (Chile) replaced him.

After leaving Congress, he was appointed by the Senate and President Ricardo Lagos, to the Board of Directors of Televisión Nacional, Chile's public service broadcaster, where he would serve until 2003. In addition, he was a member of the Advisory Council on Foreign Relations for the Minsitry of Foreign Relations under President Michelle Bachelet.

Ribera has maintained a close relationship with the National Renewal Party, being a member of the Supreme Tribunal as a director of the Center of Thought and the Liberty Institute, and a member of the political commission. For this reason, he was a part of the campaign committees that drafted the diplomatic platform for the candidate Sebastián Piñera in the elections of 2005 and 2009. However, he did not join Piñera's cabinet. On Jiuly 9, 2010 by Decree 098, Sebastián Piñera named Ribera ad honorem President of the Council of General Internal Auditing of the Government.

On July 2011, he was appointed Minsiter of Justice, replacing Felipe Bulnes, in a time of important issues and low popularity for the administration. During his time as Minister, he was active in the legislative field and sought to improve the quality of life for gendarmes and prisoners in Chilean prisons. Ribera used his wide network of contacts to expedite the legislative agenda, achieving cross-sector agreements.

He promoted and implemented a law that allowed the repatriation of almost a thousand convicted foreigners to their respective contries, after completing a sentence in Chile and with a prohibition on return. He firmly supported the strengthening and the modernization of the Chile Gendarmerie, the construction of new prisons in Copiapó (Los Arenales), Talca (La Laguna) and the transformation of the San Miguel de Santiago prison into a women's prison. An achievement relavent to these goals was his decision to strengthen and move the Chilean Gendarmerie School to the city of Traiguén, modernizing its plans and programs of study.

He also worked on the development of a law that created penalties that could replace the privation of liberty and a law that made the destination of judges more flexible. He created local courts in order to increase access to justice and created the "Register of Ineligibility for Sex Offenders against Minors."

On December 17, 2012, after a week of personal attacks for having received emails as rector from the President of the National Accreditation Committee, who had been charged with bribery along with other institutes of higher education, Ribera resigned as Justice Minister due to accusations he called "unfounded" and the impossibility of personally defending himself due to his position as minister. After being released to the press after the fact, the emails showed no evidence of wrongdoing on Ribera's part.