Metka Ipavic

Ambassador Mrs Metka Ipavic was born in Maribor,  Slovenia. She studied Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Management at the University of Maribor, where she graduated in 1988. After graduating, she began her career as a financial management and audit consultant at Finea Holding in Maribor, before joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia in 1992.

In her early diplomatic career, she served as an adviser for the Nordic and Baltic countries and later as Economic Counsellorat the Embassy of Slovenia in Belgium, where she was also accredited to the Benelux countries and acted as chargé d’affaires a.i in in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

In 2000,Ambassador Metka Ipavic was entrusted with establishing the Embassy of Slovenia in The Hague. Shortly afterwards, she took up positions in Brussels, serving as Deputy Permanent Representative to the EU Political and Security Committee (PSC), and later as Slovenia’s Permanent Representative, including during Slovenia’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2008. From 2010 onwards, she headed several regional departments within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ljubljana, covering North and Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. Between 2013 and 2018, she returned to Brussels as Deputy Permanent Representative of Slovenia to the EU (Coreper I).

Her ambassadorial appointments included serving as Slovenia’s Ambassador to France from 2019 to 2024, concurrently accredited to Morocco and Monaco. During this time, she also represented Slovenia as Permanent Delegate to UNESCO. Most recently, in 2024–2025, she held the position of Deputy Director General for Political Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of Slovenia.

Ambassador  Metka Ipavic has undertaken additional training at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, as well as at the International Institute of Public Administration in Dublin and Paris.

She speaks English, French, German, Croatian and Serbian. She is married and has one child.