Kjaerum, Morton

Morten Kjærum is director of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) in Vienna. He was the founding director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR), Denmark’s national human rights institution, and developed it within 17 years from a small organization to a large internationally recognized institution. He started his career in the non-governmental sector, at the Danish Refugee Council. Kjærum was a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) from 2002-2008 and was a member of the EU network of independent experts responsible for monitoring compliance with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (2002-2006). Kjærum has been involved since 1991 in human rights capacity building projects with governments and national institutions in all parts of the world. From 1986 until today, he has written extensively on issues related to a number of human rights issues and in particular refugee law, the prohibition against racial discrimination, and the role of national human rights institutions. Kjærum holds a master’s of law from the University of Aarhus, Denmark and is a Danish national.