Barbara Trachte is Brussels Secretary of State for Economic Transition and Scientific Research, as well as Minister-President of COCOF, the French Community Commission. She is the very first ecologist in the country to be in charge of the Economy portfolio.
Born in 1981 in Schaerbeek, in the Brussels-Capital Region, to a Belgian father and a Rwandan mother, Barbara Trachte has been a member of the Ecolo party since 1999. Involved with Amnesty International from a very young age, she rallies around the issue of the Rwandan genocide and the major debates on human rights throughout the world. As a lawyer at the Federal Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers, and later a lawyer at the Brussels bar, she is also involved in parallel in the Ecolo party, for which she was a candidate in the federal and regional elections of 1999 and 2000.