Wolfgang Kaleck

In 2007, attorney Wolfgang Kaleck founded the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin together with internationally active attorneys, and has been its Secretary General ever since.

Before founding the ECCHR, the specialist lawyer for criminal law had been working as a criminal defense lawyer in the law firm Hummel.Kaleck.Rechtsanwälte. Since 1998, he has also worked in the Coalition Against Impunity to ensure that those responsible for the murder and so-called disappearances of Germans during the Argentine military dictatorship are held accountable. Together with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Kaleck pursued criminal cases against U.S. military officials, including former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, from 2004 to 2008.

Wolfgang Kaleck is a member of the advisory boards of the Forum for International and Criminal and Humanitarian Law (FICHL), the Coalition for International Criminal Justice (CICJ), the Colombian lawyers’ collective CCAJAR, the Mexican human rights organization ProDESC, FIAN Germany, and the board of the Paul Grüninger Foundation. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Kaleck is active as a publicist ( e.g. Law versus Power, 2018).

He has received several awards for his work as a lawyer and founder of ECCHR. In 2020 and 2022 he was appointed as Scholar in Residence at the Sorensen Center at the City University New York/ CUNY.