Petra Bayr, President of the Assembly

Theodoros Rousopoulos, PACE President

BIOGRAPHY

Petra Bayr has been a member of the Austrian National Council (lower house of Parliament) since 2002 and Chairperson of the National Council's Committee on Foreign Affairs since 2025. She is the SPÖ (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, Social Democratic Party of Austria) parliamentary group’s spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Global Sustainibility Policy.

Petra Bayr has been a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) since 2018. She chaired the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination from 2020 to 2022 and the Committee on the Election of Judges to the European Court of Human Rights in 2024 and 2025. As rapporteur, she has dealt with issues such as combating discrimination, racism and intolerance; advancing women's rights; tackling conflict-related sexual violence; protecting women human rights defenders; and promoting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She is also a member of the Austrian delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).

She was also President of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF),is a member of the Committee on Strategy, Investment and Policy of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and Board member and treasurer of Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA).

Alongside her political career, Ms Bayr has been fully involved in numerous civil society organisations, some of which she founded herself. Born in Vienna in 1968, she studied sociology and education at the University of Vienna. She has a Master of Arts degree in Human Rights from the Danube University Krems – with a thesis on Austrian AIDS policy from a human rights perspective – as well as a Master's degree in Legal Studies from the same university, with a thesis on the criminal offence of incitement to hatred in the Austrian Criminal Code.

Full CV