Manfred Nowak (born 26 June 1950 in Bad Aussee) is an Austrian human rights lawyer, who served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2004 to 2010. He is Secretary General of the European Inter-University Center for Human Rights and Democratisation (EIUC) in Venice, Italy; Professor of International Human Rights and Scientific Director of the Vienna Master of Arts in Human Rights and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights and a former judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2016, he was appointed Independent Expert leading the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty.
Career
Nowak was a student of Felix Ermacora, and cooperated with him until Ermacora's death in 1995. They co-founded the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Menschenrechte (with Hannes Tretter) in 1992.
In addition to his function as Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Human Rights at Vienna University, Nowak was:
Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at Utrecht University, Netherlands (1987–89) Head of the Law Department of the Austrian Federal Academy of Public Administration in Vienna, Austria (1989–2001) Olof Palme Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University, Sweden (2002–2003) Visiting Professor at EIUC in Venice, Italy (2004) Swiss Chair of Human Rights at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland (2008–2009) Austrian Visiting Chair at Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA (2014).
Since 2016, he is the Secretary General of EIUC in Venice, Italy, which is responsible for the Global Campus of Human Rights with seven Master programmes in all world regions and many other activities in the field of human rights and democracy education. He regularly teaches at various other universities, including the American University in Washington, DC.
As United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nowak was one of the five authors of a United Nations report on the detention of captives at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba(2006) and one of four authors of a UN report on secret detention in the fight against terrorism (2010).
In 2005, Nowak visited China, claiming that torture remained "widespread" there. He also complained of Chinese officials interfering with his work.
In September 2006, he alleged that torture may be more of a problem in Iraq since the Iraq War than under Saddam Hussein's regime. Much of the torture, he argued, is carried out by security forces, militias and insurgents.
From 6 to 9 November 2006, he presented at the international panel at Gadjah Mada University for adoption of Yogyakarta Principles and has become one of the 29 signatories.
In February 2008, Nowak was a founding member of the 'Research Platform Human Rights in the European Context' at the University of Vienna.
Nowak is a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.
As internationally renowned expert in the field of human rights, he carried out various independent expert functions for the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE as well as for NGOs and in the corporate sector. The most important expert functions are the following: