Lars Castellucci

Lars Castellucci (born 24 February 1974 in Heidelberg) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and a member of the Bundestag since 2013. He is the party's candidate in the Rhein-Neckar constituency (Wahlkreis 277) in Baden-Württemberg and holds his seat through the SPD state list rather than a constituency plurality. Since 28 May 2025 he has been the federal government's commissioner for human rights policy and humanitarian assistance at the Federal Foreign Office, in the cabinet of Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

He passed the Abitur in Walldorf in 1993 and then did civilian service at what is now the Psychiatric Centre Nordbaden. From 1995 to 2000 he studied political science, medieval and modern history and public law at Heidelberg University, including a year at San Francisco State University in 1997–1998, and graduated with a Magister Artium. In 2008 he completed a doctorate at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. From 2000 to 2013 he worked as an organisational consultant at IFOK in Bensheim, and from 2000 to 2004 he lectured in the labour-administration department of the Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences in Mannheim. Since 2013 he has been professor of sustainable management, especially integration and diversity management, at the Hochschule der Wirtschaft für Management in Mannheim, on leave since May 2019.

In parliament his formal brief has centred on interior policy. He has sat on the interior committee since 2013 and was its deputy chair from 2022 to 2025. From 2018 to 2023 he was the SPD parliamentary group's spokesperson on migration and integration, and from 2018 to 2025 its spokesperson on churches and religious communities. At the 2021 federal election the SPD took 41,205 first votes in Rhein-Neckar (27.0 percent), behind the Christian Democratic Union of Germany on 43,487 (28.5 percent). In 2025 the SPD total there was 33,082 first votes (20.4 percent), against 34.4 percent for the CDU, and the constituency was left without a directly elected member because second-vote coverage was insufficient under the electoral law then in force.

The commissioner's office deals with human-rights policy in Germany's external relations and with humanitarian assistance. In October 2026 Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul criticised a social-media post in which Castellucci, after a thwarted attack on a Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv, wrote that Israel was losing its last friends because of its far-right government and those who defend it. Wadephul called the remark inappropriate and wrong, and the Foreign Office said it could be misunderstood as relativising antisemitism.

Early life and education

Family background

Lars Castellucci was born on 24 February 1974 in Heidelberg and is Protestant. He has written that the birth was in a Heidelberg hospital and that he would otherwise have gone to a children's home; a foster grandmother he calls "Oma" Noelle took him in, and on 16 September 1976 he was adopted by Bruno Castellucci and Bruno's wife Christel, after Noelle's son, a work colleague of Bruno's, had made the connection. The curriculum vitae in his dissertation names those parents as Bruno Castellucci, a retired systems analyst born on 16 September 1941, and Christa, née Adam, a retired sales assistant born on 31 December 1937, notes that they were divorced, and gives his address as in Wiesloch.

He has described that father as an Italian migrant rather than a guest worker. In October 2013 he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that his father had come from Italy for love, that Italian was not spoken at home, and that his mother, "eine waschechte Kurpfälzerin", spoke only standard German so that his father could learn the language. In July 2024 he told Business Insider that the couple had met on holiday in Italy; his father, from a village south of Rome, arrived in the Kurpfalz in the 1960s, worked on building sites, trained as a construction draftsman, learned German after work, later qualified as a systems analyst and worked at SAP, while his mother, he said, had found marriage to a foreigner difficult and had pressed him to learn German almost without an accent.

School, civilian service and university

That dissertation CV lists the Schiller primary school in Wiesloch from 1980 to 1984, the Gymnasium Wiesloch from 1984 to 1991, and the Gymnasium Walldorf from 1991 to 1993, where he passed the Abitur in 1993 with a mark of 1.4.

After school he performed Zivildienst, the civilian substitute for conscription, at the institution now called the Psychiatric Centre North Baden, whose main site is in Wiesloch.

From 1995 to 2000 he studied political science, medieval and modern history, and public law at Heidelberg University, finishing with a Magister Artium graded 1.3. In 1997–98 he studied at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, on scholarships from Heidelberg and the Fulbright Program; from 1997 to 2000 he also held a stipend from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The Federal Foreign Office curriculum vitae names the same three subjects and lists Heidelberg, Mannheim and San Francisco as the places of study, without a separate Mannheim degree beside the Heidelberg Magister.

Doctorate

In 2008 he received a Dr. phil. from the Technische Universität Darmstadt. The thesis, Inklusion und Arbeitsmarkt. Schaffen Netzwerke neue Perspektiven für Benachteiligte? ("Inclusion and the labour market. Do networks create new prospects for the disadvantaged?"), was submitted on 29 June 2007 to the Department of Social and Historical Sciences and defended on 6 February 2008; the referees were Hubert Heinelt and Wolfram Lamping, and the work appeared in the university's D 17 series. When it was filed he was a senior consultant at the organisational consultancy IFOK in Bensheim and still a doctoral candidate.

It asks whether cooperative labour-market policy in a business-oriented network can open prospects for people disadvantaged by unemployment and social exclusion since the oil shocks of the 1970s, using the Initiative für Beschäftigung!, its Rhine-Main network and the Fraport project "Jugend mobil" as the case. Rather than equating disadvantage with a single label such as long-term unemployment, he defined it, through a questionnaire and interviews in a grounded-theory design, as being threatened by or already living with exclusion across work, consumption, social contact and civic participation. The conclusion is guarded: networks are not a cure-all, but under stated conditions they can improve the responsiveness and efficiency of labour-market policy, and measures for this group need activating, stabilising and qualifying elements aimed at employment that can finance a life.

Professional and academic career

Consulting and lecturing

From 2000 to 2013 Lars Castellucci worked as an organisational consultant at IFOK GmbH in Bensheim, Hesse. The Bundestag biography records that employment, and the register of members' interests lists the pre-parliamentary post as senior adviser. The Federal Foreign Office curriculum vitae describes the same years as advice on municipal and regional development, without naming an employer; the SPD parliamentary group's biography places that advisory work at IFOK. IFOK GmbH, also entered as Institut für Organisationskommunikation (Amtsgericht Darmstadt, HRB 25159), has its seat in Bensheim. Its registered object is advising organisations in business, politics and society on entrepreneurial and political problems through communication processes.

In parallel, from 2000 to 2004, he was a lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter) at the Fachhochschule des Bundes für öffentliche Verwaltung, in the labour-administration department in Mannheim. That department was a faculty of the federal internal university of applied administrative sciences, which trains candidates for the higher intermediate non-technical civil service. The university's chronicle dates the faculty from 1 October 1979 and records its dissolution on 31 December 2008, naming the Hochschule der Bundesagentur für Arbeit as the successor. The published biographies do not specify the subjects he taught.

Professorship and the Institute for Social Sustainability

Since 2013 Castellucci has been professor of sustainable management, especially integration and diversity management, at the Hochschule der Wirtschaft für Management (HdWM) in Mannheim. He has been on leave since May 2019. Bundestag disclosures place the post under professional activity before membership of parliament and record a right to return and protection against dismissal. He states that the appointment, paid at 2,289.37 euro gross a month, has been suspended since the leave began.

The HdWM is a private university of applied sciences. The German Science and Humanities Council records that it was founded in March 2010 and received state recognition from Baden-Württemberg in September 2011, after a concept accreditation limited to five years. At the Council's later review, the non-profit carrier, Hochschule der Wirtschaft für Management gGmbH, was 75 percent owned by the Internationaler Bund. The university offered bachelor's and master's programmes in business administration, business psychology and social work. In the winter semester 2019/20 it had 468 students, and monthly tuition ranged from 490 to 650 euro depending on the programme. On 22 January 2021 the Council reaccredited the institution for five years. It attached conditions on the basic statute and appointment rules, on the share of teaching by full-time professors, and on staffing in social work, and judged the research output still in need of improvement.

In July 2015 the HdWM announced an Institut für Soziale Nachhaltigkeit. Castellucci, by then a member of the Bundestag, was named founding director, together with vice-president Uwe Hochmuth and Esin Bozyazi as deputy director. The university described the institute as a workshop for research, transfer into practice and policy recommendations, concerned with the social dimension of sustainability. Current Bundestag disclosures list him as unpaid chair of the board of the Institut für Soziale Nachhaltigkeit e.V. in Wiesloch; his CV dates that office from 2022. A members' meeting on 12 December 2024 confirmed him as chair, with Bozyazi and the lawyer Azize Ekinci as deputy chairs and Hochmuth as the board member for finance.

Local politics and party offices

Municipal and county mandates

According to his own account, Castellucci joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1992. The biography of the SPD group in the Bundestag lists him as chair of the party’s Wiesloch branch from 1995 to 2002, as an SPD member of the Wiesloch municipal council (Gemeinderat) from 1999 to 2013, and from 2001 as chair of that council’s SPD group. At the municipal election of 7 June 2009 he headed the SPD list and received 5,689 votes, more than any other Social Democratic candidate; the list as a whole received 51,363 votes.

That biography also records him as chair of the SPD in the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis from 2001 to 2009. The state party’s report for 2007–2009 describes the county association as having about 3,300 members in 71 local branches and calls him its long-serving chair. A county congress in Hockenheim on 20 June 2009 elected Thomas Funk of the Epfenbach branch to succeed him. The report says a programmatic platform for the 2009 federal election, which Castellucci had initiated, was adopted by a large majority at the state congress in Singen in February 2009.

In the county-council election on the same 7 June 2009 he received 2,298 votes in the Wiesloch-area constituency, the highest SPD personal total there. The district lists him among members of the eighth Kreistag (2009–2014), a roll that also includes those who left early. After entering the Bundestag he resigned the seat. A report of 11 February 2014 quoted him on about 22 sitting weeks a year in Berlin, noted that he had been the SPD group’s deputy social-policy spokesperson, and named Dr. Brigitta Martens-Aly of Schatthausen as his successor.

The Wieslocher Woche later reported that an initiative circle around Castellucci formed in 2005 and that the Bürgerstiftung Wiesloch was constituted in May 2006, with Michael Sieber of the Christian Democratic Union as first board chair and Castellucci as chair of the foundation council. About 50 founding donors provided nearly 150,000 euro, and an early gift helped start the Wieslocher Tafel, a local food bank.

Leadership in the Baden-Württemberg SPD

The Bundestag group’s biography and Castellucci’s 2018 letter to members date his term as a deputy state chair of the SPD in Baden-Württemberg from 2005 to 2018. At the state congress in Fellbach on 21–22 September 2007, where he was already an incumbent, delegates confirmed him as deputy for northern Baden with 77.3 percent; the other deputies were Peter Hofelich, Hilde Mattheis and Elvira Drobinski-Weiß, and Ute Vogt was re-elected state chair with 77.4 percent.

The executive listed for 2007–2009 included him in the Präsidium under Vogt. With Hofelich, and with Katja Mast and Martin Rosemann, he led the project group “Gute Arbeit”, set up to sharpen the state party’s profile on fair work. In April 2008 the executive adopted the group’s motion on temporary agency work: equal pay and conditions for equal work, a restored ban on tying a temporary contract to one assignment, and a cap on how long a worker could be lent to one employer. The group’s drafting also fed the labour-market section adopted by a large majority at the Singen state congress in February 2009. The same report shows him representing Baden-Württemberg’s county associations at a regional SPD congress for the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan area, held on 28 March 2009 in Limburgerhof, Rhineland-Palatinate.

He remained a deputy under later chairs. On 9 October 2015 in Mannheim, after Nils Schmid’s re-election, Castellucci was confirmed with 86.2 percent, alongside Leni Breymaier (89.7 percent), Peter Friedrich (80 percent) and Hilde Mattheis (78.3 percent). On 22 October 2016 in Heilbronn, when Breymaier became state chair with 84.89 percent, Castellucci was re-elected deputy for northern Baden with 263 votes, 83.76 percent.

In 2018 he challenged Breymaier for the chair. A membership ballot, not binding on the congress, drew almost 53 percent of about 36,000 members and was counted three times: Breymaier received 9,176 votes (48.46 percent) and Castellucci 9,137 (48.25 percent), with 623 abstentions. She then withdrew, calling the party divided, and asked him to help find a third candidate; he said he would stand. On 24 November 2018 in Sindelfingen, Andreas Stoch, chair of the SPD’s Landtag group, won with 159 votes (50.64 percent) to Castellucci’s 151 (48.09 percent) and four abstentions. Castellucci congratulated Stoch, urged unity for the coming European and local elections, and said he would concentrate on his mandate in Berlin. Jasmina Hoster, Dorothea Kliche-Behnke, Parsa Marvi and Gabi Rolland were elected the new deputy chairs.

Bundestag candidacies and election results

The Rhein-Neckar constituency

Wahlkreis 277 Rhein-Neckar is a Bundestag constituency in Baden-Württemberg. For the 2025 election the federal returning officer defined it as 34 municipalities of the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, including Sinsheim, Wiesloch, Walldorf, Leimen, Neckargemünd, Eberbach, Nußloch, Rauenberg and Sandhausen; the district’s remaining municipalities belong to constituencies 274 and 278.

Several larger towns in the same district therefore lie outside Wahlkreis 277. Weinheim is in constituency 274, with the city of Heidelberg, while Schwetzingen and Hockenheim are in constituency 278, Bruchsal–Schwetzingen. In 2025 the Rhein-Neckar constituency had 195,510 people eligible to vote.

Elections to the Bundestag are a personalized form of proportional representation. Each voter casts a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a party’s state list, the Landesliste. Until 2021 the candidate with the most first votes won the constituency seat. From 2025, after the electoral reform of 2023, a party candidate wins that seat only if the seat is also covered by the seats the party’s second votes produce in that Land, known as Zweitstimmendeckung. Within each Land, a party’s constituency leaders are ranked by their share of the valid first votes, and the party’s seats there are assigned in that order. If the party has fewer seats than constituency pluralities, the constituencies with the lowest first-vote shares stay without a directly elected member; an independent who leads the first vote is seated regardless. The Bundestag is fixed at 630 members, and the earlier overhang and compensatory seats no longer arise. A defeated constituency candidate can still enter if placed high enough on the closed state list.

Campaigns from 2009 to 2025

Lars Castellucci was the candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in Wahlkreis 277 at each federal election from 2009 through 2025, and he did not win the first-vote plurality in any of them. In 2009 he was 22nd on the SPD list in Baden-Württemberg. The Christian Democratic Union took the constituency with 59,755 first votes (42.3 percent). The SPD ticket received 35,426 (25.1 percent), ahead of the Free Democratic Party on 12.6 percent, Alliance 90/The Greens on 10.6 percent and Die Linke on 7.5 percent; turnout was 73.6 percent of 195,971 eligible voters. Castellucci did not become a member. The Bundestag’s biography dates his membership from 2013.

On the SPD state list published for 2013 he stood 13th, after Gabriele Katzmarek. Stephan Harbarth of the CDU won the direct seat, with 72,271 first votes (49.7 percent) against Castellucci’s 37,724 (25.9 percent). Castellucci entered on the state list. In 2017 a state delegates’ assembly in Schwäbisch Gmünd placed him 12th. Harbarth again led the first vote, with 57,788 votes (37.4 percent) to Castellucci’s 36,886 (23.9 percent); the Alternative for Germany was third on 13.1 percent, and turnout was 78.9 percent. Castellucci was returned on the list. Harbarth left the Bundestag in 2020 on becoming president of the Federal Constitutional Court.

The 2021 contest was the narrowest. Moritz Oppelt (CDU) won the direct mandate with 43,487 first votes (28.5 percent); Castellucci received 41,205 (27.0 percent). The Greens took 14.9 percent, the FDP 11.7 percent and the AfD 10.0 percent, on a turnout of 78.3 percent. Castellucci was tenth on the SPD state list and again entered by that route, while Oppelt sat as the directly elected member.

At the election of 23 February 2025 Castellucci was twelfth on the SPD Baden-Württemberg list and once more the constituency candidate. Oppelt led the first vote with 55,930 votes (34.4 percent). Achim Köhler of the AfD was second with 33,086 (20.4 percent), four votes ahead of Castellucci’s 33,082 (20.4 percent). The Greens received 11.0 percent, Die Linke 5.1 percent and the FDP 4.3 percent; turnout was 83.8 percent. On second votes in the constituency the CDU led with 31.1 percent, the AfD had 20.7 percent and the SPD 15.7 percent. The CDU’s first-vote leads in Baden-Württemberg were not all covered by its second-vote seats, and the returning officer recorded Wahlkreis 277 as unoccupied for lack of Zweitstimmendeckung. Nationwide, 23 constituency leaders received no seat—15 from the CDU, four from the AfD, three from the CSU and one from the SPD—and the situation arose six times in Baden-Württemberg, more often than in any other Land. Oppelt did not return to parliament. Castellucci did, elected on the state list; the Bundestag lists that mandate separately from his candidacy in Wahlkreis 277. Köhler also entered on the AfD list.

Interior affairs, migration and integration

Committee membership and leadership

Lars Castellucci has been a full member of the Bundestag Committee on Internal Affairs and Home Affairs (Ausschuss für Inneres und Heimat) since 2013. In the 20th electoral term the Alternative for Germany nominated the chair under the Zugriffsverfahren after the groups failed to agree a distribution. On 15 December 2021 its nominee, Martin Hess, received six votes in favour and 40 against; the members put off naming a deputy, and Petra Pau of Die Linke took interim charge as the longest-serving member. Hess again missed a majority on 12 January 2022, as did the AfD nominees for the health and economic-cooperation committees.

The committee then elected Castellucci deputy chair by 37 votes to six, with two abstentions, and, with no chair in place, he was to lead it for the time being. In June 2022 the Federal Constitutional Court refused to install the AfD nominees pending the main case (2 BvE 10/21); the Bundestag recorded that the three committees were being run by their deputies. He later presided over the 28 November 2022 hearing on faster asylum procedures and the 11 December 2023 hearing on the returns bill, whose protocol names him as chair of the sitting.

The titles for 2022–2025 differ. The Bundestag biography, based on members' own disclosures, the Social Democratic Party group page and a September 2022 Bundestag press notice call him stellvertretender Vorsitzender. The Federal Foreign Office CV calls him Geschäftsführender Vorsitzender and, in English, "Executive chairman of the Committee on Internal Affairs and Community" — the acting role of a deputy where no chair was elected, not a separate election as full chair. In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the interior committee and of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, but not deputy chair.

Spokesperson for migration and integration

From 2018 to 2023 he was the SPD group's spokesperson for migration and integration, and from 2018 to 2021 also deputy interior-policy spokesperson. The spokesperson's post passed on 26 September 2023 to Rasha Nasr, its deputy since February 2022; by April 2023 the group was already presenting her, not him, as rapporteur for the new skilled-immigration bill.

In February 2023 Der Spiegel, calling him the SPD's migration expert and the committee's vice-chair, reported a paper on municipal reception. It proposed assigning to municipalities only people already granted residence, faster asylum decisions, fuller use of removal powers, and debt relief against a municipal investment backlog he put at 160 billion euro. He also wanted Germany to suspend the voluntary European Union solidarity mechanism, arguing that, after about a million arrivals from Ukraine, further admissions from Italy made European distribution less equal. Spiegel tied the paper to a summit called by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser that produced no immediate money.

Legislative work on asylum and immigration

On 7 June 2019 he spoke for the SPD on the Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz. He called Germany a country of immigration that needed rules: the act admitted vocationally qualified people and those seeking work or training, not only contracted recruits, so legal routes could undercut smuggling, though it was not yet a single immigration code.

In the 19th term he was the SPD rapporteur on a motion by Alliance 90/The Greens (Drucksache 19/17513) calling for admission of particularly vulnerable people from the Mediterranean and for municipal reception. The committee report of 23 June 2021 (Drucksache 19/31058) names him among the rapporteurs and recommends rejection, which the CDU/CSU, SPD, AfD and Free Democratic Party supported against the Greens, with Die Linke abstaining. At the November 2022 hearing, Julius Becker of the Republican Lawyers' Association said the coalition draft on faster asylum procedures (Drucksache 20/4327) ignored poor decisions, would multiply cases and restrict rights, citing a 36 percent success rate for asylum appeals the year before.

While he was still spokesperson, the Bundestag passed a further reform of labour immigration from outside the EU, including an opportunity card (Chancenkarte) scoring language, experience, age and ties to Germany, and entry for some IT specialists without a degree. Faeser called the result the world's most modern immigration law; Andrea Lindholz of the CDU/CSU called it a Mogelpackung that lowered standards and a "bureaucratic monster".

On 8 June 2023 EU interior ministers, Faeser among them, agreed border screening, normally within twelve weeks, for people from countries treated as safe, and obligatory solidarity, including payments from states that refused admissions; Germany dropped its demand to exempt families with children. Faeser called it a historic success, while Annalena Baerbock said it was not the government's own text and Green members warned of a cut to the right of asylum. Castellucci's February paper had instead urged a pause in voluntary Mediterranean admissions.

In autumn 2023 the government asked parliament to list Georgia and Moldova as safe countries of origin (Drucksache 20/8629); at first reading on 12 October it cited a 2022 recognition rate of about 0.1 percent for both nationalities. The law took effect on 23 December 2023. The government said case-by-case examination remained; Pro Asyl and Clara Bünger of Die Linke objected, citing Roma in Moldova, the rule of law in Georgia, and persecution of queer people there.

On the Rückführungsverbesserungsgesetz (Drucksache 20/9463) he chaired the 11 December 2023 hearing but was not a rapporteur; the protocol names Helge Lindh (SPD), Christoph de Vries (CDU/CSU), Filiz Polat (Greens), Stephan Thomae (FDP) and Gottfried Curio (AfD). The Bundestag's notice said the draft carried out a 10 May 2023 agreement between Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the minister-presidents: pre-removal detention could continue despite an asylum application, including a repeat application; maximum Ausreisegewahrsam would rise from ten to 28 days; and authorities could enter rooms in a collective centre other than the person's own room.

Other parliamentary offices

European Union affairs and the German–Italian group

In the 18th Bundestag, from 2013 to 2017, Lars Castellucci sat on the Committee on the Affairs of the European Union. The Basic Law requires the committee in every term. It is the chamber’s cross-cutting forum for European integration, institutional reform, enlargement and cooperation with the European Parliament and other national parliaments.

He also chaired the German–Italian Parliamentary Group in those years. Parliamentary groups are cross-party bodies for dialogue with parliaments abroad. From 25 to 28 May 2015 he led a delegation to Sicily and Rome focused on refugees crossing the Mediterranean, with talks planned with municipalities, aid organisations at a reception centre and the Triton mission, then a conference in Rome. German and Italian members afterwards called, in a joint declaration, for a common European Union asylum and immigration policy.

Sustainability, democracy and religious affairs

In April 2014 the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development elected him unanimously as deputy chair, an office his Bundestag biography dates to 2013–2017. First appointed in 2004, the council follows federal sustainability policy at national, European and United Nations level and checks it against sustainable-development guidelines. He said he would work across party lines to give sustainability more weight in parliament and government.

From 2013 to 2017 he was spokesperson of the SPD group’s working group on democracy. On 9 June 2016 the Bundestag rejected, with the governing parties’ votes, opposition bills for a three-stage popular legislature in the Basic Law. Castellucci called the drafts largely sensible and direct democracy one answer to the felt distance between politics and the public, but said the coalition agreement required the SPD to vote with its partner.

From 2018 to 2025 he was the SPD group’s commissioner for churches and religious communities. At the party reception for the Protestant Church synod in Würzburg on 13 November 2018 he encouraged the church to speak in politics when a Christian view of the person made that necessary. On 24 June 2025 the group appointed Hubertus Heil to succeed him after seven years.

The parliamentary group executive

On 3 June 2025 the SPD Bundestag group elected him to its extended executive, one of 25 members chosen that day. With the managing board, the executive runs the group’s business, plans its work, prepares group meetings and reports back, normally meeting on Mondays at 17:00 in sitting weeks.

The Bundestag lists him in 2021 as a member of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, whose task is to uphold human rights worldwide, and in 2021–2022 as a deputy member of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development. The development committee covers worldwide economic cooperation and social justice, from education and health to climate protection and public administration.

In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the development committee, constituted on 21 May 2025 as an 18-member body chaired by Wolfgang Stefinger, with Castellucci one of four SPD members. He is a deputy on the human-rights committee and, since 17 October 2025, a deputy on the Subcommittee on International Order, the United Nations and International Organizations, which the Foreign Affairs Committee set up to stress rules-based multilateral cooperation.

Since 25 June 2025 his published interests have listed membership of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Population and Development of the Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung. The foundation provides the secretariat of this informal cross-party body, founded in 2003 to press political and financial support for the 2030 Agenda, especially health and gender equality, and names him as a member in the 21st term.

Political positions

Migration, asylum and returns

For the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Castellucci called migration normal and to be shaped for migrants, hosts and countries of origin. In July 2024 he said Chancellor Olaf Scholz's demand to "finally deport on a large scale those who have no right to remain" had split party and group. The Spiegel interview as a whole was strong, he said, but that sentence was not the Social Democratic heading. The Jusos called it the vocabulary of the "right-wing mob"; the Free Democratic Party welcomed it; Andrea Lindholz of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria doubted the coalition was serious.

He treated removal as the counterpart of legal migration: non-citizens who offend can already be prosecuted and, where possible, deported, but readmission agreements were still needed, and the returns package with the Länder was the follow-up to Scholz. On 27 June 2024 he told the Bundestag that municipalities needed "something like a breathing space", cited migration agreements, a European deal, border controls and faster procedures, and said abolishing Article 16a of the Basic Law would be "a step back into barbarism".

In November 2023 he, Frank Schwabe and Fabian Funke proposed UNHCR- and EU-run "migration centres" abroad, with no forced detention and travel only after recognition. Scholz, Nancy Faeser and Dirk Wiese had just doubted the outsourcing Hendrik Wüst of the CDU wanted. In June 2024 Castellucci called the Union's Albania and Rwanda plans impractical and compared moving refugees to moving nuclear waste. CDU/CSU members called that an outrage; Mechthilde Wittmann called the speech disinformation. His later row, as human-rights commissioner, over Afghan admission promises is separate from this.

Assisted suicide

On 26 February 2020 the Federal Constitutional Court voided section 217 of the Criminal Code, the ban on geschäftsmäßige assistance in suicide: assistance organised repeatedly, not necessarily for payment. A self-determined death, it held, includes asking others for help, and parliament could add a protection concept.

With co-sponsors from Alliance 90/The Greens, the FDP and Die Linke, and 111 signatures from every group but the AfD, Castellucci and CDU member Ansgar Heveling proposed a new offence of up to three years. Assistance would be lawful only after, as a rule, two psychiatric or psychotherapeutic examinations three months apart, further counselling and a wait; institutions need not take part. Katrin Helling-Plahr and Renate Künast, also backed across the SPD, Left and FDP, left the criminal law, required counselling and allowed lethal medication, with a hardship exception. Castellucci said a protection concept without consequences was none.

On 6 July 2023 free votes rejected his text 303–363, with 23 abstentions, and the other 286–375, with 20. A suicide-prevention motion passed 687–1. Künast welcomed the fall of the criminal version and regretted that no rule replaced it. Eugen Brysch of the German Foundation for Patient Protection said statutes could not hold the balance and feared a surge of organised suicides. The German Society for Humane Dying wanted the drugs with no compulsory counselling. Medical Association president Klaus Reinhardt called the No right; Castellucci said he would try again.

In June 2025 he said a new cross-party group would allow a decision to die without making suicide normal or pressuring the vulnerable. German Ethics Council chair Helmut Frister welcomed not copying section 217. The Catholic Church in Germany, through Cardinal Reinhard Marx, still rejected assistance and urged hospice care.

Churches, state benefits and abuse inquiries

As SPD spokesperson on churches, Castellucci called the Ablösung of state payments a Basic Law duty inherited from the Weimar Constitution. A commission of federation, Länder, churches and experts, he told Christ & Welt, should set a sum of several billion euros — fair, he later added, not necessarily enough to reproduce the annual income.

After Markus Söder told Pope Francis the subject was "off the table", Castellucci said using only convenient parts of the constitution was too casual, and that the churches wanted the split. The payments, for property secularised in 1803, then exceeded 600 million euros a year, about 60 per cent to Protestant churches. Blocking a settlement, he warned, risked the sums simply being cut. The Länder, who pay, balked at a cost in the tens of billions. In April 2025, with the issue absent from the Union–SPD deal, he told Deutschlandfunk it was "dead": the Länder had unanimously refused — "we really did run into a wall". The state might instead take over some of about 40,000 church buildings due to be sold by 2060.

On labour law he told the news service Idea that copying "practically all state structures" was a secularisation of the church. Proclamation posts could stay reserved, private life should not test loyalty, and staff should be able to strike because "workers' rights are not divisible". He kept the German model of separation plus cooperation; the coalition had agreed only to examine an alignment with the churches.

On abuse inquiries he said "with every shoddy expert report the reckoning fails a little more": one published, one withdrawn, a third released only in part. Churches could not investigate themselves, he argued. He wanted the commissioner and the inquiry commission in statute, reporting to the Bundestag. Without a change of course, he said, the churches would "abolish themselves".

Commissioner for human rights and humanitarian assistance

Appointment and mandate

On 28 May 2025 the cabinet of Chancellor Friedrich Merz named Lars Castellucci, a Social Democratic member of the Bundestag, Commissioner of the Federal Government for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Assistance, succeeding Luise Amtsberg of Alliance 90/The Greens. The post, created in November 1998 at the Federal Foreign Office, is not a ministerial office, and he remained a member of the Bundestag.

He advises the foreign minister—then Johann Wadephul of the Christian Democratic Union—and leads the German delegation at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. The office does not investigate complaints about human-rights violations inside Germany, which the Foreign Office leaves to the courts under Article 19(4) of the Basic Law, and it treats humanitarian assistance as emergency relief rather than development aid. Castellucci said human rights should again be seen as "a great treasure", partners met as equals, and that "moralising does little for human rights".

Travel and public statements

From 28 to 30 July 2025 his first trip took him to Palermo and Lampedusa. He cited more than 145,000 Mediterranean crossings toward Europe in 2024 and more than 1,100 dead or missing, called for a European Union policy in which nobody died, and was due to fly with Sea-Watch. Sea-Watch said that on 29 July he was aboard its aircraft Seabird 2 while a merchant ship tried to rescue more than 90 people; the boat capsized, two children died and one person was missing.

On 1 September 2025 he went to Israel and the Palestinian territories, including the West Bank and the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem. He urged Hamas to free about 50 hostages unconditionally, Israel to let aid into the Gaza Strip, a ceasefire, and a two-state settlement, citing Germany's responsibility for Israel's security.

From 22 to 25 February 2026 he attended the 61st Human Rights Council session, citing Sudan, Iran and the fourth year of Russia's war against Ukraine. From 26 April to 2 May he visited Kinshasa and Beni in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the Foreign Office described more than seven million people displaced there, about 25 million facing food insecurity, and a sharper crisis after the Rwanda-backed March 23 Movement took Goma and Bukavu in early 2025. From 12 to 15 July he was in Tripoli, noting about one million people who had reached Libya from Sudan since 2023. On Human Rights Day 2025 he quoted Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; in October 2026 he rejected the death penalty outright and cited at least 2,707 executions in 2025, most of them in Iran.

Disputes over Israel and Afghan admissions

In December 2025 he broke with the government over Afghan admissions. After a Federal Constitutional Court case, the Interior Ministry said it no longer had a political interest in people on a bridging programme or a human-rights list—about 640 of up to 1,800 Afghans waiting in Pakistan on German promises. On 11 December he called it "unwürdig" (unworthy) that an ideological migration debate was being fought over a small group, mostly women and children, who could not return to Afghanistan. He said the court had required the government to protect them while decisions were not final, and that the decent thing would be to admit them to Germany.

On 30 March 2026 the Knesset expanded the death penalty to Palestinians who killed Israelis for terrorist motives, but not to Israelis who killed Palestinians. Castellucci told Deutschlandfunk Kultur that the law was discriminatory and put Israel outside "our value system", and wrote that the death penalty was cruel, inhuman and incompatible with human dignity. Ambassador Ron Prosor replied that with such friends one needed no enemies, speaking of arrogant lectures and double standards while Israelis were under fire from states seeking Israel's destruction. The embassy cited the use of the death penalty against Nazis, called the 7 October 2023 attack genocidal, and said the law was meant to protect Israeli citizens.

On 30 September 2026 a co-pilot attacked the captain of a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv; the injured pilot opened the cockpit and passengers overpowered the attacker. German reports put about 174 passengers aboard, including 27 children, and said Israel treated the incident as a jihadist attempt while motive and intent were not fully established. Karin Prien, the CDU minister for education and family affairs, asked on X why it seemed to stir so little reaction. Castellucci answered that a horrific crime had been prevented and wrote: "Because Israel is just losing its last friends. Because of its far-right government and everyone who defends it." He added that he spoke as a friend of Israel, that friends were held to a stricter standard than terrorists, and that antisemitism still had to be fought.

On 5 October a Foreign Office spokesman, citing Wadephul, called the post inappropriate and wrong: a private remark by an MP that generalised the situation and could be read as relativising antisemitism. Castellucci did not comment. Prien accused him of an empathy-less reaction to a planned killing of almost 200 mostly Israeli people; others called the posts a reversal of perpetrator and victim.

Civic engagement, publications and personal life

Associations, foundations and church offices

The Bundestag register, drawn from Castellucci's disclosures, lists membership of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, the German Alpine Club, the Walldorf branch of the German Life Saving Association, Europa-Union Deutschland, the education union GEW, the NaturFreunde, and local bodies around Wiesloch, among them the food bank Wieslocher Tafel. Offices are entered separately: the advisory board of the Beschäftigungsinitiative Wiesloch und Umgebung (BIWU); the unpaid chair of the Institut für Soziale Nachhaltigkeit e.V. in Wiesloch; the chair of Pizza & Politik e.V., dated from 27 November 2023 in a disclosure from the previous term; from 25 June 2025, the parliamentary advisory council of the German Foundation for World Population; and, until 26 July 2025, the board of trustees of World Vision Deutschland. Pizza & Politik e.V. says it spreads a format, already used for more than ten years in the Rhein-Neckar district, in which young people meet politicians.

The curriculum vitae in his dissertation lists him as a founding member of BIWU in 1997 and of its advisory board from 1999, as initiator of the Bürgerstiftung Wiesloch in 2004 and chair of its council from 2006, and as a founding member of the Wieslocher Tafel; the SPD group's biography dates that chair to 2006–2022. The same CV records church posts apart from his later parliamentary brief on churches: part-time church musician from 1986; the Protestant church in Baden's D-level certificates for organists (1992) and choir directors (1995); direction of the Protestant church choir in Baiertal from 1993 to 2002; and, from 2004, the chair of the Wiesloch deanery synod, after two years as deputy. The SPD biography ends the chairmanship in 2008, and the Bundestag lists him as Protestant. The Evangelical Church in Germany named him on its Chamber for Migration and Integration for 2016–2021; a Bundestag disclosure closed that honorary seat in December 2021.

Writings

The 2008 Dr. phil. from the Technische Universität Darmstadt is Inklusion und Arbeitsmarkt. Schaffen Netzwerke neue Perspektiven für Benachteiligte?, submitted on 29 June 2007 and defended on 6 February 2008. It treats mass unemployment since the oil-price shocks of the 1970s as a route into social exclusion that the welfare state had not closed, and tests whether networks can do more, using the business-led Initiative für Beschäftigung!, its Rhine-Main network and the Fraport project "Jugend mobil". The repository abstract says networks are not a cure-all but can strengthen responsiveness, through moves into open-ended, socially insured jobs and through activation, stabilisation and training, rather than income support alone.

Verlag Herder lists him among the contributors to Semper Reformanda. Das Verhältnis von Staat und Religionsgemeinschaften auf dem Prüfstand, edited by Isabelle Ley, Tine Stein and Georg Essen (first edition, 2023, 384 pages, ISBN 978-3-451-39512-3). The Verlag Psychiatrie und Geschichte in Zwiefalten presents, in Psychiatriehistorische Vignetten, Marco Grosse's German translation of Alda Merini's L'altra verità (Die andere Wahrheit), edited by Thomas Müller and Lars Castellucci; the page spells the surname Castelluci, gives ISBN 978-3-931200-34-3 and links 2024 ordering material.

Private life

The Bundestag biography, from members' self-reports, states that he was born on 24 February 1974 in Heidelberg, is Protestant and is unmarried. The dissertation's title page calls the author "aus Heidelberg"; the CV filed with it gives an address in Wiesloch and again lists him as unmarried. A 2014 profile by the Bundestag's internet desk described him as a Social Democrat from Wiesloch whose father had given up Italian citizenship in the 1970s for German citizenship and, in retirement, again asked where he belonged. In an interview the Christian magazine pro published on 9 May 2019, he said that he himself is gay and that he was adopted, and described his mother's difficulty with the belief that homosexual acts are sinful.