He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and completed a professorial thesis on Political Ethics at the University of Strasbourg, France. Until 2016, he coordinated the Interdisciplinary Institute of Ethics and Human Rights (IIEDH) at the University of Fribourg, and he currently chairs the Observatory on Diversity and Cultural Rights (an IIEDH programme established in 2004) and the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Democracy, at the same university.

He is well-known for his work in the field of cultural rights at an international scale, as the main promoter of the Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007), the result of 20 years of work by an international group of experts, known as ‘the Fribourg Group’, which fosters cultural rights within the human rights system. Patrice Meyer-Bisch has conducted research in several European and African countries.

He has significantly influenced the understanding of cultural diversity and cultural rights as ways to achieve inclusive sustainable development for everyone and in all areas, through the effective implementation of the interdependency of human rights. In the context of these activities, cultural rights are understood, alongside economic rights as well as civil, political and social rights, as the basis, the ‘grammar’, the space for interpretation, for the development of all individuals and societies.