Marcel Kolaja

Marcel Kolaja
Kolaja in 2021
Quaestor of the European Parliament
Incumbent
Assumed office 20 January 2022 Serving with See List
Member of the European Parliament for the Czech Republic
Incumbent
Assumed office 2 July 2019
Vice-President of the European Parliament
In office 3 July 2019 – 18 January 2022 Serving with See List
President	David Sassoli Roberta Metsola (Acting)
First vice chairman of the Czech Pirate Party
Incumbent
Assumed office 8 January 2022
Co-chairman of the PPI
In office 13 March 2011 – 30 November 2011
Personal details
Born	(1980-06-29) 29 June 1980 (age 43) Moravská Třebová, Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia)
Political party	Czech Republic: Czech Pirate Party EU Party: European Pirate Party EU Parliament group: Greens/EFA
Alma mater	Masaryk University

Marcel Kolaja (born 29 June 1980 in Moravská Třebová) is a Czech software engineer, Internet freedom and digital rights activist and a Czech Pirate Party politician who serves as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since the 2019 election and Quaestor of the European Parliament since 2022. He is a member of the Greens–European Free Alliance parliamentary group along with three other European Pirate Party MEPs.

Kolaja has been a member of the Czech Pirate Party since 2010 and the Vice-President of the Czech Pirate Party since 2022. From 2019 to 2022, he served as Vice-President of the European Parliament. He serves as Quaestor of the Parliament since 2022, being responsible for overseeing the administrative and financial matters of the institution. Kolaja graduated from the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno.

In the European Parliament, in addition to being a Bureau member, he engages in the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO), the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT), and the Special Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus (PEGA), as well as in the delegations for relations with the United States (D-US) and with India (D-IN).

Topics related to the functioning of society in the digital age are his main focus. Marcel Kolaja stands for open technologies, freedom on the Internet, independence of media, transparency, and a united Europe.^[1]