Paul NEMITZ, born 1962 in Bonn, a German national, is the Principal Advisor in the Directorate General for Justice and Consumers of the European Commission. He was appointed in April 2017, following a 6-year appointment as Director for Fundamental Rights and Citizen’s Rights in the same Directorate General. As Director, Nemitz led the reform of Data Protection legislation in the EU (GDPR), the negotiations of the EU – US Privacy Shield and the negotiations with major US Internet Companies of the EU Code of Conduct against incitement to violence and hate speech on the Internet. 

Nemitz is a visiting Professor of Law at the College of Europe, Bruges, and a Honorary Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). 

Nemitz is the convener of the interdisciplinary Transatlantic Reflection Group on Democracy and the Rule of Law in the age of Artificial intelligence and a regular speaker at the Athens AI Roundtable. He was a Member of the German Government Data Ethics Commission until it delivered its consensus report in 2019. He is a Member of the Commission for Media and Internet Policy of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Berlin, a Member of the Board of the Verein Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie e.V., Berlin and a Trustee of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. He chairs the Board of Trustees of the Arthur Langerman Foundation at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). He is a Member of the Global Council on Extended Intelligence of the IEEE and the MIT in Boston and a Member of the Boston Global Forum of the Michael Dukakis Institute.  He is also on the Advisory Board of the Trustless Computer Association, Zurich, and the Association for Accountability and Internet Democracy, Paris. 

Nemitz studied Law at Hamburg University. He passed the state examinations for the judiciary and for a short time was a teaching assistant for Constitutional Law and the Law of the Sea at Hamburg University. He obtained a Master of Comparative Law (M.C.L.) from George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., where he was a Fulbright grantee. He also passed the first and second cycle of the Strasbourg Faculty for Comparative Law.