Manfred Nowak is an Austrian human rights expert and academic who served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture (2004–2010) and as a judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996–2003).
Manfred Nowak is Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
He served in various expert functions, such as UN expert on enforced disappearances (1993-2006), UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (2004-2010), judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996-2003) and Vice Chairperson of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (2013-2018). In 2016 he was appointed Independent Expert leading the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty.
In addition to his function as Professor of Public and International Law at Vienna University, Manfred Nowak also served as Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at Utrecht University (SIM: 1987-1989) and of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights at Vienna University (BIM: 1992-2019) as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Lund (2002-2003), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (2008-2009), and at Stanford University in Palo Alto (2014).
He is author of more than 600 publications in the fields of public and international law and human rights.