Rüdiger Wolfrum

Rüdiger Wolfrum (born 13 December 1941 in Berlin) is professor of international law at the Heidelberg University Faculty of Law and director emeritus of the Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Wolfrum is a justice in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea since 1996, serving as president of the court from 2005 to 2008.

After his military duty, Wolfrum studied law at the universities of Tübingen and Bonn from 1964 to 1969. Passing his first state exam on 18 January 1969, he earned a PhD in International Law in 1973. Wolfrum served as Vice President of the German Research Foundation from 1996 to 2002, and as Vice President of the Max Planck Society from 2002 to 2006. In 1996, he was appointed Justice at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea; from 2005 to 2008 he has served as its president. Mr. Wolfrum is President of the German Society for International Law, and he has also been a member of numerous national and international councils and academies, such as the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Institut de Droit International. Besides his numerous offices, he has instructed the High Justices of Afghanistan and Sudan, and he has acted as a United Nations mediator in the Darfur conflict. He holds honorary degrees of the Russian Academy of Sciences, of the Mongolian Shihutug Law College, the University of Hamburg, and of the University of Pretoria. In 2008, he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since January 2013 he is one of the managing directors of the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law.