# Marcel Kolaja

Marcel Kolaja (born 29 June 1980) is a Czech software engineer, Internet freedom and digital rights activist and a former Czech Pirate Party politician who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to 2024 and Quaestor of the European Parliament from 2022 to 2024. He was a member of the Greens–European Free Alliance parliamentary group along with three other European Pirate Party MEPs.
Kolaja was a member of the Czech Pirate Party from 2010 to 2024 and the Vice-President of the Czech Pirate Party from 2022 to 2024. From 2019 to 2022, he served as Vice-President of the European Parliament. He served as Quaestor of the Parliament from 2022 to 2024, being responsible for overseeing the administrative and financial matters of the institution. Kolaja graduated from the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University.
Apart from being a Bureau member in the European Parliament, Kolaja was a member of 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.

## Activism and Czech Pirate Party beginnings (2003–2018)

Kolaja worked as an activist against the adoption of software patent legislation in the European Union (EU) from 2003 and joined the Czech Pirate Party in 2010. He became the second candidate of the Czech Pirate Party in the 2014 European Parliament election but was not elected. Kolaja has worked as a technical product manager in Red Hat Czech, a research and development arm of Red Hat, Inc., which itself became a subsidiary of IBM on 9 July 2019.

## European Parliament (2019–2024)
### Election

Kolaja was the party's leading candidate for the 2019 European Parliament election in the Czech Republic and was elected MEP along with Markéta Gregorová and Mikuláš Peksa. His political agenda focuses on digital rights and prevention of increasing Internet censorship; environmental protection such as fossil fuel phase-out and minimizing waste pollution; consumer protection, addressing technological competitiveness of the EU on the world market and limiting corporate lobbying in the EU. Among his priorities is also addressing tax avoidance by multinational corporations that offshore profits via tax havens.

### Tenure

On 3 July, Kolaja was elected one of fourteen Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament. He also serves as a vice-chairman of the parliamentary Working Group on ICT Innovation Strategy, as a member of the Bureau of the European Parliament as well as European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection. Kolaja aims guarantee fair competition in the online economy by preventing Big Tech gatekeepers from abusing their power. He played a crucial role in initiating FOSSEPS (Free and Open Source Software Solutions for European Public Services), which aims to "manage and protect open source and treat it as a collective European asset across Europe".

### Committee assignments

Kolaja was a member of the following Committees of the European Parliament:
* Bureau of the European Parliament
* European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO)
* European Parliament Committee on Culture and Education (CULT)
* Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware (PEGA)
* Delegation for relations with the United States

## Independent politician (2024–present)

After November 2024 leadership election Kolaja announced his departure from the party, due to different views on politics.