Education
University of Innsbruck, 1945-1948, Doctor of Laws. University of Paris, 1948-1949. Spoken languages: German, English, French.
activist politician university professor
University of Innsbruck, 1945-1948, Doctor of Laws. University of Paris, 1948-1949. Spoken languages: German, English, French.
In 1974 he was President of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and from 1984 he was United Nations Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan. In 1992, he cofounded the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Menschenrechte, with his students and close collaborators Manfred Nowak and Hannes Tretter, and served as its first director He was part of United Nations delegations investigating human rights abuses in Chile, South Africa, occupied Palestine, Iran and Afghanistan.
On behalf of the Council of Europe, he investigated human rights abuses in Algeria, Greece, Ireland, Turkey and Cyprus.
As an academic, a legislator and a United Nations official, he fought unconditionally against injustice and human rights abuses. In an expert opinion commissioned by the Bavarian government in 1991, Ermacora concluded that the Expulsion of Germans after World World War II constituted a genocide and crime against humanity.
As the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan, he uncovered "gross violations of human rights" by Soviet forces in Afghanistan, made public in a 1985 report. In 1999, the Felix Ermacora Institut was founded, and in 2005, the Felix Ermacora Human Rights Award was established by the Faction of the Conservative Party in the Austrian Parliament.
The Felix Ermacora Society was founded in 2005, and is headed by Wolfgang Schüssel, the former Austrian Chancellor.
His students include Andreas Khol, a former President of the Austrian parliament and, mosts prominently, Manfred Nowak. He died in 1995, of a disease he caught on a United Nations mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan in December 1994.
He was a professor of international law at the University of Innsbruck from 1956, at the University of Vienna from 1964, member of Parliament for the Austrian People"s Party from 1971 to 1990, member of the European Commission of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee 1959-1980 and 1984-1987. He received honorary doctorates at the universities of Cologne and Strasbourg, and was a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 1971. He was also a board member of the International Society for Human Rights.