Helen Keller has frequently served the Council of Europe as an expert on a wide range of topics such as, Kosovo’s statehood, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Istanbul Convention and its consequences for member states of the Council of Europe, the question of whether the European Court of Human Rights should have a mixed chamber (with the participation of judges from the highest courts of the member states), on the independence and impartiality of judges of the Court and questions concerning an autonomous human right to a healthy and intact environment under a new additional protocol.
However, Helen Keller’s greatest contributions come from her work at and about the Court. She is a luminary in the field of legal research on the European Court of Human Rights. She has authored "Friendly Settlements" and "A Europe of Rights", which are regarded as standard reference treatises on the Court. As a judge at the Court from 2011 to 2020, she has had a significant influence on the case-law of the Court, e.g. on Art. 18 European Court of Human Rights which is the Court’s alarm bell in situations of serious threat to the rule of law in CoE member states. In her research project “Climate Rights and Remedies”, she analyses the role of courts, including that of the Court, in climate cases.
Since 2020, Helen Keller has served as a judge at the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In performing this role, she acts in furtherance of the Council of Europe's objectives of upholding the rule of law, respect for democracy and human rights.
The project “75 women in 75 years of Council of Europe history” is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to the Council of Europe with the Council of Europe and the Permanent Representations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
