Dr. Christopher Kuner has been active in EU and global data protection law since the 1990s as a lawyer, author, and academic. He was director of the Brussels Privacy Hub and professor of law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) between 2014 and 2023, and has taught data protection law at the University of Cambridge, the European University Institute in Florence, and the Hague Academy of International Law. He has also been a visiting fellow at Chuo University in Tokyo, and received a medal from the Consumer Affairs Agency of the government of Japan for services to Japanese consumers and the promotion of EU data protection law in Japan. Over the years he has been involved in the work of various international organisations, including the Council of Europe, the OECD, UNCITRAL, and the United Nations. He has also worked for three decades in international law firms in Germany and Brussels, and for ten years was chairman of the Data Protection and Privacy Task Force of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Paris, where he successfully negotiated standard contractual clauses for international data transfers that were approved by the European Commission.
Dr. Kuner is currently Senior Privacy Counsel in the Brussels office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Innovation and Information Law at the University of Copenhagen, and Visiting Fellow at the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity at Maastricht University. He is also a member of the European Commission’s Multisectoral Stakeholder Group on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The author of numerous articles and books, Dr. Kuner is founder and editor-in-chief of the law journal International Data Privacy Law, and one of the three principal editors of the commentary on the GDPR published by Oxford University Press. His writings have been cited many times by courts and regulators in the EU, the US, and beyond. He has a JD from Notre Dame Law School and an LLM from NYU Law School in the US, and a PhD in law from Tilburg University in The Netherlands.