Barbara Lochbihler has been elected member of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances since 2019, serving on her second term. Besides regular interaction with State Parties a particular focus of her work is enforced disappearances in the context of migration. She initiated and guided the drafting of the Committee’s General Comment No. 1 on this specific issue which was adopted in September 2023.

From 2009 to 2019 Barbara Lochbihler was a Member of the European Parliament and in that capacity Chair and Vice-Chair of the Subcommittee on Human Rights. During her Parliamentary mandate she chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee’s delegation on UN-EU relations and the Iran delegation of the European Parliament. She was Secretary General of Amnesty International Germany from 1999 to 2009 and Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF, Geneva) from 1992 to 1999. In all these positions the abolition of the death penalty was an ongoing issue of her work and topic of numerous encounters with representatives of governments, parliaments, and civil society worldwide.

Barbara Lochbihler holds a M.A. in Political Sciences, International Law, and Economics, and a Diploma in Social Work. She has been a lecturer at the M.A. Human Rights at University Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2019.

She is a founding member of the German Institute for Human Rights and was a Board Member of the Martin-Ennals-Foundation, Geneva, from 2019 until 2024.