Biography

Born in 1957 in Linz, Austria, Stefan Hammer studied Law as well as Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Vienna and received his law doctorate in 1980. From 1980, he worked as assistant and Assistant Professor at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at Vienna University and has taught Public Law also at the Federal Academy of Public Administration and at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. In 1988/89, he was visiting researcher at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal) and in 1994/95, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas School of Law (USA). In 2004, he obtained his habilitation in Constitutional and Administrative law as well as Legal Philosophy with a study on the Freedom of academic research and teaching. In 2007, he has been appointed permanent Visiting Professor for Constitutional Law at Bratislava University of Law (Slovakia), and since 2011 he has been lecturing at the Faculty of Law of the University Paris Descartes (Paris V). From 2014, he has been teaching civil servants of the Ethiopian Justice sector in the framework of an LLM Program carried out in Addis Ababa and at Mekelle University. He is a member of the Association of German Constitutionalists and has served as a rapporteur for the European Consortium for Church and State Relations.

From 1986 to 1987 and from 1989 to 1990, he was assigned to the office of the Legal Adviser of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has worked as deputy head of the human rights department. He served as Austrian delegate to various international conferences on human rights, especially to the three conferences on the Human Dimension of the CSCE in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and acted as UN observer at the South African elections in 1994. From 2011, he has been participating in the “Bali Democracy Forum”, Indonesia, which is held annually since 2008. Since December 2012, he is a member of the Board of Advisers of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO).

From 1996, he has participated Austrian-Iranian Dialogue Conferences on basic concepts of legal and political philosophy, human rights, religion-state relations, and democracy, and in 2011, he also participated in the second Catholic-Muslim Forum in Jordan. In 2007/2008, he joined in the planning of the biennial Vienna Christian-Islamic Summer University at Stift Altenburg (Austria) and continues to teach there. He has coordinated the academic agenda of the First and the Third Austrian-Indonesian Dialogue Conferences on religious pluralism which took place in Vienna in 2009 and in 2011. Currently he coordinates future intercultural dialogue conferences with Iran and Indonesia.

In 2006, he acted as Austrian coordinator in the global research project on “Foreign Relations in Federal Countries” carried out by or the Forum of Federations, Ottawa (Canada). In 2007, he was in charge of the sub-theme “Techniques, Structures and Processes of Intergovernmental Relations in Federal Countries” at the 4th World Conference on Federalism in New Delhi (India). From 2009, he has been in charge of several research cooperation conferences on constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina carried out by the Faculty of Law in Vienna and the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo (Bosnia).

Stefan Hammer published and teaches in the fields of constitutional and administrative law, legal philosophy, European and comparative constitutionalism, human rights and protection of minorities, and religion-state relations.

Areas of Interest

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