Andreas Zimmermann

Andreas Zimmermann (born 18 June 1961) is a German legal scholar, Professor of International and European Law at the University of Potsdam . He is also the director of the Potsdam Human Rights Centre . Before his appointment in Potsdam, he was Professor of Public International and European Law, as well as Director of the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law at Kiel University.

Life After graduating from high school in 1980, he studied law at the University of Tübingen (Germany) and the Université de Droit Aix-Marseille III (France). He then passed the Second State Examination (7th in class of 577) while working part-time as an assistant at the Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. There, he submitted his PhD thesis “Das neue Grundrecht auf Asyl” (The new fundamental right to asylum), which was awarded summa cum laude and received the Ruprecht Karls Prize of Heidelberg University.

He declined appointments at the University of Hannover and the Institut de Hautes Études Internationales in Geneva in favour of a position as Professor of Public International and European Law and Director of the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law at Kiel University, where he served from 2001 to 2009. He is also the co-editor of The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol - A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 2024). Over the course of his career, Zimmermann has held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan (United States), Copenhagen (Denmark), Tartu (Estonia), Johannesburg (South Africa), Hebrew University (Israel), Birzeit University (Palestine), Sorbonne Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), as well as the Hague Academy of International Law. the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, and the German Federal Constitutional Court. He has also served as an ad hoc judge in proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights.

As a member of, and legal adviser to, the German delegation he contributed to the negotiations that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court (1996–1998). serving until 2020. He is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Advisory Board on International Law at the German Federal Foreign Office . Since 2025, Zimmermann has served as the elected President of the OSCE Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.