Prof. Manfred Nowak was elected to the Commission in May 1995.

Since 2004, professor Nowak is the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. He is also member of the EU Network of Independent Experts in Fundamental Rights and he lectures Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna. Professor Nowak is co-Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM).

Since 1996, he has served as Judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and, since 2000, as Chairperson of the European Master Programme on Human Rights and Democratization (EMA) in Venice. From 1987 to 1989, he was Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the University of Utrecht, and from 2002 to 2003 Olof Palme Visiting Professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) at the University of Lund.

Prof. Nowak was a member of the Austrian delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights for many years, before he was appointed in 1993 as expert member of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances. During this term he also served as UN expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia, and after his resignation in 2001 he was appointed UN expert on legal issues relating to the drafting of a binding instrument on enforced disappearances. He also advises the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on poverty reduction strategies.

Prof. Nowak is a board member of various international and Austrian NGOs and was appointed in 2000 chairperson of a Human Rights Commission at the Austrian Ministry of Interior with the task of monitoring the police. In 1994, he was awarded a UNESCO prize for the teaching of human rights. He has published more than 350 books and articles in the fields of human rights, public law and politics.

Prof. Nowak holds an LLM from Columbia University in New York and a PhD from Vienna University.