Helen Keller (judge)
Helen Keller (born 1 June 1964 in Winterthur, Switzerland) is a Swiss lawyer and judge. She is a professor of law at the University of Zurich.
She studied law at the University of Zurich, worked as an assistant in the law chairs of Alfred Kölz and Heribert Rausch, and earned a doctorate in 1993 on environmental constitutional law, winning the Professor Walther Hug Prize. She also earned an LL.M. at the College of Europe in Bruges. From 1996 to 2002 she was a senior assistant at the University of Zurich, wrote her habilitation on the “Reception of International Law,” and led a project creating a multi-volume commentary on the Environmental Protection Act.
After a research stay at the Max Planck Institute, she joined the University of Lucerne in 2002 as a permanent visiting professor. Two years later she was offered the full chair for public law, European and international law in Zurich.
Her international service includes being elected by the UN General Assembly in 2005 to the United Nations Human Rights Committee (re-elected in 2010). In 2011 she was appointed for a nine-year term as judge of the European Court of Human Rights in respect of Switzerland. In 2020 she became an international judge at the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
She is a board member of the Swiss section of the International Commission of Jurists. She is married with two sons and speaks English, French, German, Italian, and Polish.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:51 (CET).