Biography | Catherine Stihler — The Strasbourg Hemicycle That Held Her Seat for Twenty Years

People treat a Scottish member of the European Parliament as someone who worked mainly in Edinburgh.

For four terms the job sat in this Strasbourg chamber.

On 10 June 1999 Scotland elected eight MEPs on a closed regional list.

Labour took three of those seats on 283,490 votes.

Catherine Taylor, the name still used on some 1999 papers, stood third on that Labour list and took the third seat.

She was twenty-five and became the United Kingdom's youngest MEP in that intake.

The fifth European Parliament opened on 20 July 1999.

The Louise Weiss building on Allée du Printemps was inaugurated later that year, on 14 December 1999.

From that winter the hemicycle in this tower was the Strasbourg room of the mandate.

She was re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014 and left the Parliament on 31 January 2019.

In the later terms she served as vice-chair of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee.

The file of that committee included the digital single market, accessibility rules for disabled users, and graphic health warnings on cigarette packets across the Union.

David Iliff photographed her on this complex on 5 February 2014.

The pin is the Parliament building at Allée du Printemps, not a private address in Fife.

Photo: David Iliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons