Category: Localising Human Rights

I remember the first time I had a long conversation with Koen De Feyter. It was in the cantine of the Law Faculty in Antwerp. I had started working on the Localizing Human Rights project of Koen a few weeks earlier and was expected to carry out a case study regarding the right to water…

The period between February and August 2025 marked the conduct and completion of the empirical research for my PhD project, which examines the role of bilateral development finance institutions in the protection against human rights violations in land-based investments with displacements effects in Sub-Saharan Africa. The research comprised field work on two development projects: the…

Dear Koen, It has been more than a year since we lost you. The world is trembling. Human rights and international law — the fields you studied and defended — are being challenged and violated, every single day. One of your final contributions to scholarship and to justice was a legal brief, co-authored with Gamze…

The fieldwork interviews and focus group discussions remain vivid in my memory. I can still remember the determination in a rural-urban migrant mother’s voice as she described ‘manipulating’ the complex yet leaky Hukou system (i.e., a household registration system that categorizes the national population into urban and rural segments in China) to secure her child’s…

Less is more: Upendra Baxi didn’t need more than 12 pages to sketch the societal relevance of law, more than 30 years ago, in a paper on judicial discourse.[1] He wrote this piece, not coincidentally as we will see, when he was vice-chancellor of Delhi University. In 2018, Baxi was proposed by the Faculty of…