Biography

Olivier De Schutter (born 20 July 1968) is a Belgian legal scholar specialising in economic and social rights. He served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014. He is a Professor of international human rights law, European Union law and legal theory at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, as well as at the College of Europe and at Sciences Po in Paris. He was a regular visiting professor at Columbia University between 2008 and 2012 and has regularly contributed to the American University Washington College of Law's Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. He is the first chair of the Belgian Advisory Council on Policy Coherence for Development and he co-chairs the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), a group of experts from various disciplines and regions who work together towards developing proposals for food systems reform. A Member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights between 2015 and 2020, he was appointed the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and took up his functions on May 1, 2020.

The son of a diplomat, his primary and high school education took place in Bombay (now Mumbai), India; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Kigali, Rwanda. He studied law at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Panthéon-Assas University and Harvard University, before obtaining a Ph.D. from the UCLouvain. His doctoral thesis, a comparative study of the role of courts in fundamental rights adjudication, was published in French as Fonction de juger et droits fondamentaux. Transformation du contrôle juridictionnel dans les ordres juridiques américain et européens, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 1999, 1164 pp. His subsequent publications are in the areas of governance and human rights, with a particular focus on the issue of globalization and human rights and economic and social rights more generally, and on the protection of fundamental rights in the European Union. Among his books on human rights are International Human Rights Law. Cases, Materials, Commentary, initially published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and which went through a second and third, revised editions in 2014 and 2019. He also published extensively on economic globalization and human rights, most notably advocating in favor of improving linkages between trade policies and labour rights and environmental standards (Trade in the Service of Sustainable Development, Hart/Bloomsbury, 2015) and making proposals for a more sustainable and democratic governance of natural resources, such as land and water (Governing Access to Essential Resources, Columbia Univ. Press, 2016, co-edited with K. Pistor; and Foreign Direct Investment and Human Development, Routledge, 2012, co-edited with J.F. Swinnen and J. Wouters). ...

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