News and Events 2026

​FAMIlies on the MOVE (FAMIMOVE) 3.0 addresses the coordination (or lack thereof) between international family law and migration law, co-funded by the European Commission under the JUST-2025-JCOO program. This was a follow-up to FAMIMOVE 2.0.

Shawan Jabarin, Palestinian human rights defender and Director of ‎Al-Haq Organisation | مؤسسة الحق‎, gave a public lecture on ‘Defending Human Rights amid Genocide and Apartheid in Palestine: From Persecution to Perseverance’, chaired by Professor Thalia Kruger. Shawan gave us a moving and harrowing account of his experiences as a frontline human rights defender and the reality in Palestine, in the context of increasing restrictions, US and Israeli sanctions on human rights organisations and the ICC, constant threats, and widespread and systematic human rights violations against Palestinians over decades. He argued that human rights standards and obligations are clear. But still, there is no accountability for human rights abuses and international crimes perpetrated in Palestine. He concluded the session: 

"We will not give up. We will continue to remove the masks of those responsible and complicit in these crimes. Today no one can claim they did not know. We will continue to remove the masks."

On 7th September, Anne Oloo defended her dissertation titled, “Algorithmic Accountability and Human Rights: Towards an Inclusive Framework for Social Media Obligations”. Her dissertation brings together scholarship on algorithmic accountability, human rights law, and the obligations of multinational corporations, while challenging the predominantly Global North focus of existing debates. Drawing on African human rights frameworks and using Kenya as a case illustration, Anne develops a framework for algorithmic human rights accountability that responds to structural power imbalances, state repression, corporate responsibility, and the distinctive role social media platforms play in contemporary public life.We are very proud to celebrate this milestone with you. 

Dr. Oloo was supervised by Professor dr Wouter Vandenhole. Her PhD Commission members were Prof Dr Gamze ERDEM TÜRKELLİ and Prof Dr Catherine Van de Heyning. The jury also included Prof dr Eva Lievens Prof. dr George Ogola and Dr Peggy Valcke. 

Dr. Oloo will soon be starting work on her FWO Post-Doctoral Project VIRAL. 

Dr Bram J D. of Tampere University joined us to introduce “slow erasure,” a framework developed through long-term ethnographic research and relationships in Palestine. His research examines how settler-colonial violence can operate through accumulated practices including restrictions on movement, fragmentation of land, imprisonment, injury, and the suppression of knowledge and identity. An essential caution accompanied the language of slowness: violence is not “slow” to those living through it. What appears incremental or less visible from a distance may be experienced as continuous precarity, alongside abrupt and devastating assaults. Pace and visibility depend on positionality and the politics of witnessing. Slow erasure therefore draws attention not only to the accumulation of harm, but also to the processes through which that harm is rationalised, normalised and denied. It asks us to examine how the boundaries of what appears acceptable can shift over time and what role law may play in either challenging or reinforcing that process.The session left us reflecting on a pressing question for law and development research: how can law respond to structural violence when its own categories prevent it from seeing the full pattern?

The session was organised by Maha Abdallah. Learn more about Dr De Smet’s work here.​

Professor Surya Deva, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, delivered the lecture From Conflicts to a Peace Economy: The Role of the Right to Development. The event commemorated Professor Koen De Feyter and explored how the right to development can support a transition from war economies towards peace, human rights and sustainable development.

This online workshop examined universities’ responsibilities as economic actors and emerging human rights duty-bearers. Scholars and procurement practitioners discussed transparency, human rights due diligence and responsible public procurement.

The first stakeholders’ meeting of the Just Bonding project, Filiation: Between Borders and Rights, was held at the University of Antwerp’s City Campus.

Visit the Just Bonding project website · View the programme

The Re-Empower project presented research on child marriage in Tanzania, including the role of customs and traditions and the relevance of climate-change law. Professor Sofie Vandevoogel of Ghent University also discussed the validation of research findings through a Ugandan case study.

Read more · View the programme

This public session combined personal testimony with analysis of three prominent climate cases involving Belgium, ING and TotalEnergies. Speakers also considered the International Court of Justice’s climate advisory opinion and its implications for European and national climate litigation.

Organized with the Chair of African Legal Studies at the University of Bayreuth, this workshop introduced early-career researchers to critical and decolonial approaches to socio-legal research on human rights and sustainable development in Africa.

Professor Tanja Aalberts presented work co-authored with Juliana Santos de Carvalho on the drafting of the international deep-sea Mining Code. The seminar examined how law constructs the deep seabed as a governable resource and “mankind” as its supposed beneficiary.

Dr Yasmine Luhandjula and Dr Héctor Herrera discussed the International Court of Justice’s climate advisory opinion and its consequences for state responsibility, climate justice and future environmental governance.

The Law and Development Research Group of the Faculty of Law at the University of Antwerp, in partnership with the Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at Birzeit University, successfully concluded its first-ever intensive Winter School on “The International Order After Gaza: Failures, Emancipatory Possibilities, and Decolonial Futures.”

As part of the “Emancipatory Human Rights” project supported by ENABEL, the program brought together students, scholars, and practitioners from Palestine, Belgium, Europe and around the world to reflect on the political and legal legacies of the genocide in Gaza, interrogate and debate the limits of the current international legal and political order, and explore the space for emancipatory and decolonial alternatives. Over several days, more than twenty participants from Birzeit and Antwerp Universities engaged in lectures, discussions, and field visits that connected conceptual, legal, and practical work on key issues such as self-determination, genocide, corporate complicity, institutionalised and rising repression, and the future of human rights. The program featured leading scholars in international law and human rights, alongside experienced practitioners working with international organisations such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), as well as non-governmental organisations including the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), The Hind Rajab Foundation, and the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC).

The program further included visits to key legal and political institutions in Brussels, including the European Parliament and the Belgian Federal Parliament, and The Hague, to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, during which participants were confronted with the stark discrepancy between their mandates and the reality of impunity in the face of ongoing atrocity crimes such as in Palestine. In an informal but heartwarming moment, members of the University of Antwerp’s students’ movement for Palestine welcomed and hosted the participants for dinner. The Winter School foregrounded an emancipatory approach to human rights, rooted in lived experience and critical scholarship. Participants reflected on how the ongoing genocide and apartheid in Palestine expose the brutality of settler-colonial violence, the normalisation of mass atrocities, and the complicity and failures of an international order that claims to prevent and punish such crimes. In the discussions, Palestine was presented not only as a site of injustice and suffering, but as a lens that reveals broader global dynamics of colonial and imperial violence, authoritarianism and fascism, environmental destruction, and the erosion of multilateralism, while also opening space to imagine decolonial, dignified futures. The Winter School paid tribute to those who could not be present, namely the late Professor Koen De Feyter, whose work was instrumental in conceiving the Winter School, and one of the participants from Palestine, who was arbitrarily arrested by the Israeli Occupying Forces just days before travelling to Belgium and who remains in detention. Their absence reminds us that academic work and spaces are inseparable from structures of violence, resistance, and solidarity, which are critical for collective continuity, especially in the current global context.

Students, scholars and practitioners from Palestine, Belgium and elsewhere participated in an intensive programme organized by Birzeit University and the University of Antwerp. The programme included visits to the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the European Parliament.

Professor Pedro Mouallem presented Powerful Yet Constrained: Legal Foundations of Central Banking in Brazil Across Three Crises. His research examined how legal reforms expanded the power of Brazil’s central bank while maintaining its dependence on private financial interests.