Felix Ermacora

Who was Felix Ermacora?

Felix Ermacora was the leading human rights expert of Austria and a member of the Austrian People's Party. He was a professor of international law at the University of Innsbruck from 1956, at the University of Vienna from 1964, member of Parliament for the Austrian People's Party from 1971 to 1990, member of the European Commission of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee 1959-1980 and 1984-1987. In 1974 he was President of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and from 1984 he was UN Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan. In 1992, he cofounded the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Menschenrechte, with his students and close collaborators Manfred Nowak and Hannes Tretter, and served as its first director.

He was part of UN delegations investigating human rights abuses in Chile, South Africa, occupied Palestine, Iran and Afghanistan. On behalf of the Council of Europe, he investigated human rights abuses in Algeria, Greece, Ireland, Turkey and Cyprus. As an academic, a legislator and a UN official, he fought unconditionally against injustice and human rights abuses. In an expert opinion commissioned by the Bavarian government in 1991, Ermacora concluded that the Expulsion of Germans after World War II constituted a genocide and crime against humanity. As the UN Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan, he uncovered "gross violations of human rights" by Soviet forces in Afghanistan, made public in a 1985 report.