Professor emeritus Chris Van den Wyngaert taught criminal law and criminal procedure for almost 25 years and is professor emeritus at the University of Antwerp. She has numerous publications to her name in the field of national, international, and comparative criminal law. She was a member of the Criminal Procedure Law Commission and rapporteur for the International Law Association and the Association internationale de droit pénal. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge and is an honorary professor at the University of Stellenbosch.

She was an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice (2000-2002) and then a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (2003-2009). In 2009, she was elected in New York by the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute as a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for a nine-year term. She is now a judge at the Kosovo tribunal.