Omid Nouripour

Iranian German politician

Omid Nouripour (; امید نوری‌پور ; born 18 June 1975) is a German Iranian politician of the Alliance '90/The Greens who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag since 2006, representing the state of Hesse. Since 2022, he has also been serving as co leader of Alliance 90/The Greens, alongside Ricarda Lang. Earlier in his career, Nouripour was his parliamentary group's spokesman on foreign affairs, and is a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Finance Committee. He is of Iranian background and moved to Germany as a child.

Nouripour was born in Tehran. In 1988, aged 13, Nouripour immigrated to Frankfurt, West Germany, with his family. He studied German, political science, law, sociology, philosophy and economics at the University of Mainz, but did not earn a degree. In 2002, Nouripour became a German citizen. He has since been representing the Frankfurt am Main II district and was re elected in 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021. Between 2006 and 2013, Nouripour was a member of the Defence Committee and the Budget Committee, where he served as his parliamentary group's rapporteur on the annual budgets of the Federal Foreign Office (AA), the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), the Federal Court of Auditors (BRH) and the Office of the Federal President. Nouripour was a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs from 2014 to 2022 and of the Finance Committee from 2021 to 2022. He also served on the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid from 2014 until 2017. He has written widely on migration. In addition to his committee assignments, Nouripour was the chairman of the German Ukrainian Parliamentary Friendship Group from 2018 to 2021. Already from 2014, he served as deputy chairman of the German US Parliamentary Friendship Group and the German Indian Parliamentary Friendship Group. In the negotiations to form a so called traffic light coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Green Party and the FDP following the 2021 federal elections, Nouripour led his party's delegation in the working group on foreign policy, defence, development cooperation and human rights; his co chairs from the other parties were Heiko Maas and Alexander Graf Lambsdorff.

In 2011, Nouripour accused the aerospace company EADS of strong arming European governments into agreeing to fund the Airbus A400M Atlas by falsely suggesting the Franco German led company might otherwise collapse.

Speaking on the 2012 Bahraini uprising, Nouripour commented that "[a]s the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is supporting the state repression inside Bahrain, Iran acts as the protector of the Shia." In a study sent to the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle in May 2012, Nouripour and Hans Josef Fell proposed that Germany should help Iran expand renewable energy sources to solve the conflict over the nation’s nuclear program and prevent a war in the region. Under the umbrella of the German parliaments’ sponsorship program for human rights activists, Nouripour has been raising awareness for the work of the persecuted Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh since 2012. When Turkey formally asked NATO in November 2012 to set up missiles on its border with Syria due to growing concern about spillover from the civil war, Nouripour warned against Germany and NATO "letting themselves be drawn into the Syria conflict with no basis in international law." However, he later voted for posting two German Patriot missile batteries to help bolster security along Turkey's border with Syria in the context of the NATO backed operation Active Fence in 2015. For years Nouripour opposed listing the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. However, after the 2012 Burgas bus bombing, he stated that “it’s now time to isolate Hezbollah.”

In May 2014 and February 2016, Nouripour visited the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the Syrian civil war that had been going on since 2011. Until 2020, Nouripour sat on the advisory board of the German Palestinian Society (Deutsch Palästinensische Gesellschaft), which supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which was designated as anti semitic by the German Bundestag in May 2019. In the 2019 parliamentary debate on BDS, Nouripour criticised BDS actions like the call for a boycott of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv. In 2013 Nouripour co sponsored an initiative at the German Bundestag aimed at singling out products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank with a labeling system.

Nouripour has in the past voted in favor of German participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions as well as in United Nations mandated European Union peacekeeping missions on the African continent, as for example in Darfur, Sudan (2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018), South Sudan (2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018), Mali (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2018), the Central African Republic (2014), and Liberia (2015). On Somalia, Nouripour has a mixed voting record. He has supported Operation Atalanta (2009, 2010, 2011 and 2018) but for a period of time regularly abstained from votes on extending the mandate for the mission (2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015). He also voted against German participation in EUTM Somalia (2014 and 2016), and abstained in 2015. After reports in 2010 that the German company Asgaard had signed a deal with a Somali warlord to provide security services, Nouripour accused the German government of not doing enough in the past to regulate private security firms.