Douwe Korff

Short bio

Douwe Korff is a Dutch comparative and international lawyer specialising in human- and digital rights, including data protection law. He studied at the Free University of Amsterdam (NL) and at the European University Institute in Florence (IT); was Head of European Research at Amnesty International’s International Secretariat in London (UK) in the late-70s/early-80s; did further academic work at the Max Planck Institutes for criminal and public law in Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg (DE); and taught at the universities of Maastricht (NL) and Essex (UK), before becoming Professor of International Law at London Metropolitan University in 2002. In 2014, he became Emeritus Professor there.

On behalf of the OSCE and the Council of Europe, he has taught international human rights law to judges, prosecutors, advocates and civil society representatives in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, Croatia and Montenegro.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Zagreb and Rijeka in Croatia and a Visiting Fellow at Yale University (Information Society Project), and remains an Associate of the Oxford Martin School of the University of Oxford, a Fellow at the Centre for Internet & Human Rights of the European University Viadrina, Berlin, and a member of Fundamental Rights European Experts (FREE).

Professor Korff has been closely involved with the legal responses to the Edward Snowden revelations of mass surveillance by the USA, the UK and others, and was called as an expert on those issues before the relevant committees of the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and the Lower House of the German Parliament (Bundestag).

He continues to publish widely on state and commercial surveillance, data protection, artificial intelligence and the intersections between these areas, working closely with human- and digital-rights groups such as European Digital Rights (EDRi), Statewatch, AlgorithmWatch, Article 19 and Privacy International, and, in the UK, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).