Gijs de Vries is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the European Institute of the LSE. He was State Secretary of the Interior in the government of The Netherlands. He was the representative of the Dutch government in the Convention on the Future of the European Union. He is a former Member of Parliament and a former Vice-President of the Dutch Court of Audit. From 2004-2007 he served as the European Union’s first Counter-Terrorism Coordinator. At the invitation of the European Commission he went on to chair the European Security Research and Innovation Forum (ESRIF). From 2010-2013 he was a member of the European Union’s Court of Auditors. From 1994-1998 he was the Leader of the Liberal and Democratic Group in the European Parliament.

Gijs de Vries was a co-founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations and of the Transatlantic Policy Network. He was chairman of the European Integration and Citizen Programme at the European Policy Centre (Brussels) and a member of the Advisory Council of the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam).

He has been a senior fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations ‘Clingendael’ and a senior member of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is a former lecturer in international relations at the University of Leiden.