Eric Töpfer is Senior Researcher and Policy Advisor with a focus on human rights in policing, security policies and counterterrorism. He joined the German Institute for Human Rights in 2012. After studying political science at the Free University Berlin he worked from 2001 to 2010 in several research projects on urban security, surveillance technologies and innovation processes at the Centre for Technology and Society and the Institute for Sociology of the Technical University Berlin. Afterwards, he was as freelance consultant for a UK-based civil liberties organisation, focussing on EU justice and home affairs.
Töpfer’s work at the Institute is focussing on the oversight and accountability of the police and intelligence agencies, the use of surveillance and information technologies, human rights in counterterrorism and the protection against racial profiling. Until 2020, he was regularly involved in research projects commissioned by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, among others, on access to data protection redress mechanisms, the national implementation of the EU’s large-scale IT systems in the fields of asylum, migration and security, intelligence oversight and racism in policing.