Michael Wiener

Dr Michael Wiener has been working since 2006 at the Office of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights. He was also part of the core team organizing the expert workshops that led to the adoption of the Rabat Plan of Action on the prohibition of advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence. Since 2017, he has been working on the design and implementation of the Beirut Declaration and its 18 commitments on ‘Faith for Rights’.

In 2019, he and the co-authors Heiner Bielefeldt and Nazila Ghanea were awarded with the Premio Alberigo Senior Book Award for their international law commentary on Freedom of Religion or Belief (Oxford University Press, 2016). Furthermore, he and Heiner Bielefeldt wrote the book Religious Freedom Under Scrutiny (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), which has been translated also into Bahasa Indonesia and German. In addition, he co-authored with Ibrahim Salama the book Reconciling Religion and Human Rights: Faith in Multilateralism (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022).

He has been a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford since 2011. During his UN sabbatical leave in the summer of 2022, he was also a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. The outcome of his sabbatical research is the book A Missing Piece for Peace, edited together with David Fernández Puyana (University for Peace, 2022).