Rafał Dutkiewicz graduated from the Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology at Wrocław University of Science and Technology, specialising in Applied Mathematics. He defended a doctoral thesis in formal logic (Research on Beth’s semantic tableaux method) at the Faculty of Christian Philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin. Since 1970 he has been involved in the democratic opposition movement. During the period of martial law he became a Solidarity activist. In 1989 he was appointed secretary of the Wrocław Solidarity citizens’ committee, and in 1990 he became its president. He co-organised the first Christian Culture Week in Wrocław and was president of Towarzystwo Stypendialne im. Adama Mickiewicza.
In 2002 he became the first mayor of Wrocław to be selected by direct elections. He served in this function uninterruptedly for four terms until 2018. In April 2019 he visited Berlin and joined an elite group at Richard von Weizsäcker Academy, upon the invitation of the Bosch Foundation. As one of the few guests from abroad, he had the honour of making a speech, as an honorary guest, in the Bundestag on the Day of Remembrance – one of the main bank holidays in Germany.
At present, he is involved in several start-ups working on state-of-the-art trends in the food production industry. He is also a member of the University of Wrocław Council, and for many years he has also been a member (and later honorary member) of the senate of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. He was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta (2009) and the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2015).