Christine Kaufmann is the Chair of the OECD Working Party on Responsible Business Conduct, the intergovernmental committee overseeing the implementation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the comprehensive international framework for Responsible Business Conduct. She also chairs the Network of National Contact Points on Responsible Business Conduct, which represent the unique globally active grievance mechanism under the OECD Guidelines.

Since 2002 she has been a professor of international and constitutional law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. From 2012 to 2014 she served as the Faculty’s Vice Dean and from 2014 to 2016 as the Faculty’s Dean. Her main research interests include the interactions between human rights and business, the relationship between the international trade and the international financial system as well as the related implications on global governance.

After completing her doctoral thesis on the right to food Christine Kaufmann joined the Swiss Central Bank in where she served first in the legal department and then as Director of Human Resources.
In 2009, she initiated the foundation of the Centre for Human Rights Studies at the University of Zurich, where she now serves as president of the Board. The Centre became a member of the Swiss Centre of Competence for Human Rights (SCHR), which was established by the Swiss Government in 2011 to serve as a pilot model for a future National Human Rights Institution. In this context, the Centre for Human Rights Studies is responsible for the cluster on human rights and business.

Throughout her career, Christine Kaufmann has been engaged in projects to facilitate a dialogue between different stakeholder groups. From 2013-2019 she was co-president of the multistakeholder Advisory Board for the Swiss National Contact Point. She has provided legal advice to businesses, government agencies and civil society organisations and has been invited as an expert in hearings by parliamentary commissions, the UN and the OECD. On several occasions, she acted as a mediator in cases concerning the implementation of the OECD Guidelines by business.