The faculty includes members of the Law and Development Research Group and renowned international guest lecturers, including from institutional partners in the South.
Below you can find the profiles of the lead and guest lecturers of SUSTJUSTICE.
Lecturers from the University of Antwerp, Law and Development Research Group
Prof. Dr. Koen De Feyter
Koen De Feyter is the Chair of International Law at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), Faculty of Law. He is the founder and the current director of the Law and Development Research Group at the University of Antwerp and coordinator of an international research network on “Localising human rights”. He has been involved in interdisciplinary field work on human rights and development issues in various countries in Asia and Africa, including most recently in Bangladesh, China, the DRC and India, both as a researcher and a practitioner.
Course: International Law and Sustainable Development (Course leader)
Prof. Dr. Wouter Vandenhole
Wouter Vandenhole holds the chair in human rights and the UNICEF chair in children’s rights at the faculty of law of the University of Antwerp, and directed the Law and Development Research Group between 2013 and 2018. He is now the vice-dean of research. Vandenhole is an expert in transnational human rights obligations and in human rights and development. He serves on the editorial board of several international journals, among which the Journal of Human Rights Practice and Human Rights and International Legal Discourse. He has taken up management functions in European research and teaching networks, and is the lead convener of the international training program Sustainable Development and Global Justice (SUSTJUSTICE).
Prof. Dr. Tomaso Ferrando
Tomaso Ferrando holds a PhD in law from Sciences Po Paris and has been visiting a fellow at Harvard University Law School, the University of Sao Paulo and the University of Cape Town. Before joining the University of Antwerp, he worked as a Lecturer in Law at the University of Warwick School of Law and at the University of Bristol Law School. Tomaso’s main line of research is the link between law and food, with particular attention to the international dimension (trade, investments and the human right to food) and the implementation of local practices. In the last years, he has led research projects on the socio-legal-financial construction of the green transition, climate justice in the Caribbean, and the socio-environmental challenges linked to the expansion and modernisation of container ports. Outside of academia, Tomaso has been the legal advisor of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2016 to 2020. He is a member of the Legal Committee of the Global Legal Action Network (glanlaw.org) and the Extraterritorial Obligation Consortium (ETOc) and acts as a consultant and pro-bono advocate in questions relating to human rights and environmental rights.
Course: Law and the Ecological Crises (Course leader)
Prof Dr. Gamze Erdem Türkelli
Gamze Erdem Türkelli is a Research Foundation (FWO) Flanders post-doctoral fellow at the University of Antwerp Law Faculty and a member of the Law and Development Research Group. She received her PhD in Law at the University of Antwerp (2017) focusing on children's rights obligations and responsibility for businesses and development finance institutions under international law. She holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Master's degrees from the University of Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne (France) and from Yale University (US), where she was a Fulbright Fellow. Previously, Gamze worked in the private sector as a research analyst and advisor, and in the non-profit sector in different capacities. Her research interests include new and old economic actors in development financing and governance, transnational human rights obligations, children’s rights and the links between law and development.
Course: Law and the Global Economic Governance of Development (Course leader)