Luís de Almeida Sampaio () (born Caetano Luís Pequito de Almeida Sampaio, December 16, 1957 in Porto, Portugal) is a Portuguese career diplomat. He currently serves as the Portuguese Ambassador to Prague.
Early life and academic career
Luís de Almeida Sampaio was born and raised in Porto, Portugal, to Maria Luísa de Almeida Sampaio (née Marques Pequito), a medical doctor and to Caetano Pinto de Almeida Sampaio, a civil servant with a long time career in social security and health public services.
His childhood was mainly spent in his native city where he attended primary and secondary school. During his primary school years he attended Escola Particular do Centro Social e Paroquial de Nossa Senhora da Conceição, a period he often mentions as being responsible for some of the most important things he has learned throughout his life, particularly due to his teacher, Aníbal Rocha.
He started his secondary studies in Liceu Alexandre Herculano in Porto before being transferred to Liceu António Nobre during the time of the Carnation Revolution in 1974. That was a particularly important period for Luís de Almeida Sampaio because, as a young man interested in politics, he was one of the founders of Juventude Centrista (a predecessor of the current Juventude Popular or People's Youth) in Porto.
He went on to graduate from the University of Coimbra in Portugal in 1982 with a law degree. During the years spent there, Luís de Almeida Sampaio established a close and lasting friendship with a prominent Jesuit priest, António Vaz Pinto (who later, alongside another very well known Portuguese Jesuit priest, Vasco Pinto de Magalhães, would come to officiate his marriage and baptise his two daughters), who was the first Jesuit priest to be chaplain of the University since Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquess of Pombal expelled the order from Portugal in 1759.
From that period he also recalls Professor António Castanheira Neves due to a curious situation in which Luís de Almeida Sampaio enrolled in the class of Metodologia Jurídica under Castanheira Neves and he was the only student to do so that year. Furthermore, his political thinking was profoundly influenced by one of Castanheira Neves’ books, Questão-de-facto – questão-de-direito ou o problema metodológico da juridicidade.
In 1983, while preparing for the diplomatic service concours, he attended the course Cycle d’Histoire du XXeme Siècle at the Abbey of Prémontrés in Pont-à-Mousson, Lorraine, France, organized by the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (commonly known as Sciences Po).
Diplomatic career
Luís de Almeida Sampaio joined the diplomatic service at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Portugal in 1983 and in 1984 became an Embassy attaché.
1987–1997: Brussels
In 1987 he was appointed to Portuguese Delegation to NATO (DELNATO) in Brussels, Belgium. Between 1990 and 1993, in a time coinciding with the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he served as deputy-director to the Cabinet of then Secretary General of NATO, Manfred Wörner.
In 1995 he was appointed diplomatic and political advisor to João de Deus Pinheiro, former Portuguese foreign minister and, at the time, European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response in the Santer Commission and responsible for the Cooperation with the ACP countries (African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States). The Chief of Cabinet of Commissioner Pinheiro was at that time Carlos Costa who currently serves as governor of the Portuguese National Bank.
As Advisor to Deus Pinheiro, one of Luís de Almeida Sampaio's main tasks was to participate in the set up of the first European Commission Conflict Prevention guidelines. Specifically on this subject matter, he had the occasion, at the European Congress on Conflict Prevention in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1997, to publicly outline his thinking, namely the idea of political stability as essential to security in the sense that, whereas at the time stability was an idea intrinsically linked with social and economic development, political stability as well as sustainability were paramount to an environment of security and an essential condition both for development as well as for conflict prevention : “Sampaio stressed that stability (a core concept of security policy) embraced the notion of dynamism” . This was during a time when the discussion around the EU’s capacity as a provider of security in military and humanitarian interventions was at a high, driven mainly by the events of the 1990s in Rwanda.