Olivier De Schutter has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights since May 2020. He is a professor at UCLouvain and Sciences Po (Paris), and has previously taught at the College of Europe (2008–2016), New York University (2004), Columbia University (2008–2013), and Yale University (2016–2017). He was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in 2013–2014, where he helped found the Berkeley Food Institute. In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious Francqui Prize for his contributions to international human rights law and the theory of governance. An expert on economic and social rights, Olivier De Schutter served as Secretary General of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) from 2004 to 2008. Appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food in 2008, succeeding Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler, he served in this capacity until 2014. Elected as a member of the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 2015 and reelected in 2019, he resigned from that position in order to accept the mandate as Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
Since 2015, Olivier De Schutter has co-chaired the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), a high-level group of experts from various disciplines that develops proposals for reforming food systems, particularly to maximize the potential of agroecology. Olivier De Schutter has published extensively on economic and social rights and on the links between human rights and development, as well as on the conditions for ecological transition. He has published some twenty books. His most recent works are: The Poverty of Growth, with a foreword by Kate Raworth (Pluto Press, 2024); co-authored with T. Dedeurwaerdere, Social Innovation in the Service of Ecological and Social Transformation. The Rise of the Enabling State (Routledge, 2021) (published in French translation under the title Pour un État partenaire. L’innovation citoyenne au cœur de la transformation sociale et écologique (Etopia/Altura, 2024); Changer de boussole. Growth Will Not Defeat Poverty (Les Liens qui Libèrent, May 2023); and with H. Frazer, A.-C. Guio, and E. Marlier, The Escape from Poverty: Breaking the Vicious Cycles Perpetuating Disadvantage (Policy Press, 2023).