Prof. Dr. Barbara von Rütte, attorney at law, is an assistant professor for public law with a specialization in migration law at the Center for Migration Law of the University of Bern since 2025. Her teaching and research focus on Swiss constitutional and administrative law, in particular migration law and the law of diverse societies, international law and international human rights protection, as well as methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to legal scholarship. Barbara von Rütte studied law at the Universities of Bern and Leiden (Netherlands) and completed her doctorate on the right to citizenship in international law within the framework of the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research NCCR – on the move, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, at the University of Bern. Her book ‘The Human Right to Citizenship. Situating the Right to Citizenship within International and Regional Human Rights Law’ was published with Brill Nijhoff in 2022 and awarded the Professor Walther Hug-Prize in 2024. Prior to her appointment at the University of Bern, Barbara von Rütte held positions as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (Germany), and as a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin.
Barbara von Rütte has been a member of the Federal Commission on Migration (FCM) since 2020. She is also an affiliated professor at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies (IZFG) at the University of Bern. Moreover, she has served as a consultant for the Council of Europe on administrative detention of migrants and worked at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg (France).