Biography
Professor Dr Christoph Safferling is the Director of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy. He is also Professor of Law at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg where he holds the Chair in Criminal Law, Criminal Law Procedure, International Criminal Law and Public International Law. At the university, he is Director of the Research Unit International Criminal Law. Further, he is the Whitney R. Harris International Law Fellow of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York.
Professor Safferling´s main fields of research are German and international contemporary legal history, international criminal law, human rights law and the subjective elements of crime. He is widely published in these areas and his books (in English) include Towards an International Criminal Procedure (Oxford University Press, 2003), The Nuremberg Trials: International Criminal Law Since 1945 (co-editor with Herbert Reginbogin, De Gruyter, 2006), The Genocide Convention Sixty Years after its Adoption (co-editor with Eckart Conze, T.M.C. Asser Press, 2010), International Criminal Procedure (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Victims before the International Criminal Court (co-author with Gurgen Petrossian, Springer, 2021). His work has been cited by international courts and organisations including the International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the United Nations International Law Commission and the German Federal Court of Justice. In 2018, he was also a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
In German, Professor Safferling´s books (titles translated) include the widely used textbook International Criminal Law (Springer, 2011), The Rosenburg File: The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi Era (co-author with Manfred Görtemaker, C.H. Beck, 2016), State Security in the Cold War: The Federal Prosecutor's Office between the Nazi Past, the Spiegel Affair, and the RAF (co-author with Friedrich Kießling, dtv, 2021), The Dispute: How Democracy Came to Germany and How We Are Reviving It (co-author with Friedrich Kießling, dtv, 2024) and The Powerlessness of International Law, The Return of War and Crimes against Humanity (dtv, forthcoming). He has been a member of the Independent Academic Commission at the German Federal Ministry of Justice for the Critical Study of the National Socialist Past, undertaken a study on the History of the Federal General Public Prosecutor of Germany and provided expert advice to the German Parliament. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the German Law Journal.
From 2006 until 2015, Professor Safferling was Professor of International Criminal Law at the Philipps-University Marburg where he was also the director of the International Research and Documentation Centre War Crimes Trials (ICWC). He is also a member of the scientific councils of the Bavarian Memorial Foundation, the reporting portal “REspect! Against hate speech on the internet” and the Kraków Center for International Criminal Justice. He holds an LLM from the London School of Economics and Political Science, received his doctoral degree from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1999, and his “Habilitation” at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2006.
He is fluent in German, English and French.