Migration
Walter Kälin is a Swiss professor emeritus of international and constitutional law (University of Bern, Switzerland). He set up and directed the Swiss Centre of Excellence in Human Rights, a pilot project that led to the foundation of Switzerland’s National Human Rights Institution. He has published widely in the fields of human rights, refugee law and law relating to internal displacement. As a member of the Committee on Sea Level Rise and International Law of the International Law Association, and as chair of the group of experts that drafted the 1998 UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, he was involved in ground-breaking legal work.
Throughout his career, Walter Kälin held several UN expert positions. In 1991/92 he acted as the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights on the Situation of Human Rights in Kuwait under the Iraqi Occupation. Later, he was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, the expert body monitoring the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as Representative of the UN Secretary General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons. In recent years he provided advice to the UN and governments mainly in Africa on strategies to achieve durable solutions for internally displaced persons. Presently, he is the Envoy of the Chair of the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), a State-led initiative launched by Germany and Bangladesh in 2016 as the successor to the Nansen Initiative.
Last update: 2025