Gerhart Baum tirelessly campaigns for freedom and human rights in numerous positions. Baum's grandfather was born in Kharkov and his mother was Russian. Thus, speaking out against war crimes in the Ukraine is very important to Baum. As a child, he witnessed the bombing of Dresden, after which his mother fled with him and his siblings to Bavaria. Baum studied law in Cologne, held leading positions in the FDP and was a Member of the German Bundestag. From 1978 to 1982, he was Federal Minister of the Interior and initiated important domestic policy reforms.
Baum worked for many years in the field of human rights policy at the United Nations, including as head of the German delegation to the Commission on Human Rights and at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. He was head of the German delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva and active from 2001 to 2003 as the UN Human Rights Commissioner for Sudan, where he condemned the role of foreign oil companies in exacerbating the civil war. After working several years on the expansion of the world peace order at the UN, which Russia threatens, the attack on Ukraine feels like a personal matter. In 2022, Gerhart Baum together with Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger filed a criminal complaint against Putin and members of the military for Russian war crimes in Ukraine. As a lawyer, Baum represented Soviet forced laborers against the German government and advised Eastern European governments. To this day, Gerhart Baum is actively part of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
