Axel Voss (born 7 April 1963, Hamelin) is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. He has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2009 and became coordinator of the European People's Party group in the Committee on Legal Affairs in 2017. His parliamentary work focuses on digital and legal topics. Life, education and early career Voss is Evangelical-Lutheran, married and has two daughters. From 1983 to 1990, he studied law at the Universities of Trier, Munich, Freiburg, thereby specialized in European and international law, made a language stay in Paris and eventually passed the first Staatsexamen in 1990. After assisting the UN Department of Technical Cooperation for Development in New York and a traineeship at the Supreme Provincial Court of Appeal in Koblenz, he finished his second Staatsexamen in 1994 and started to work as a lawyer. Later that year, Voss became the Citizens' adviser of the European Commission at the regional Commission Representation in Bonn. From 2000 to 2008, he taught European affairs at the RheinAhrCampus in Remagen of the University of Applied Sciences in Koblenz. Political career Voss joined the German CDU in 1996 and chaired the Bonn affiliation from 2004 to 2009. Since 2011 he has been the district chair of the CDU in the Middle Rhine area. Voss has also been a Member of the European Parliament for this constituency (which includes Bonn, Cologne, Leverkusen, Rhein-Sieg- and Rhein-Erft-Kreis) since the 2009 European elections. In his third parliamentary term from 2019 to 2024, he serves as member of the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI), deputy member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), member of the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age (AIDA), deputy chairman of the delegation for Australia and New Zealand (DANZ) and substitute member of the delegation for South Asia (DSAS). Voss has been the rapporteur or shadow rapporteur for the center-right European People’s Party group (EPP) on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Passenger Name Record (PNR), Eurojust regulation, EU-US Privacy Shield, Digital Content Directive, reform of the EU copyright law, ePrivacy Regulation, the European Parliament's legislative own-initiative report on a civil liability regime for Artificial Intelligence and the special report of the AIDA-committee. In 2014, when Edward Snowden testified before the European Parliament, Voss inquired why Snowden had chosen to go public with his information, if he had