Jozefien Van Caeneghem

Jozefien holds a Master in Laws (2008) from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. She spent one semester as an exchange student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jozefien also holds an LL.M in International and European law (2009) from VUB’s Institute for European Studies and an European Master in Human Rights and Democratization (2010), for which she spent six months at the European Inter-University Center in Venice, Italy, and six months in Vienna, Austria, at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights and the University of Vienna.

Before starting her doctoral research at the VUB, Jozefien interned with Reprieve in London (2010), where she did research on the reintegration of former Guantanamo detainees in Europe. Afterwards she volunteered on security and human rights issues at Amnesty International Flanders in Antwerp (2010). Her final internship was with the Permanent Mission of Belgium to the United Nations in New York on a variety of human rights topics.

From June 2011 to December 2017, Jozefien was enrolled at the VUB as a PhD candidate. Her research focused on the use of ethnic data collection and positive action measures to combat discrimination and promote equality and social inclusion of the Roma minority in Europe. From 2011 to 2014, Jozefien was closely involved in the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights multidisciplinary research network, FRANET, in the framework of which she reported to the FRA on racism, ethnic discrimination and Roma issues in Belgium. From September 2012 until December 2013, she coordinated FRANET at VUB level together with Marijke De Pauw.

Since January 2013, Jozefien has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Flemish Journal on Human Rights (Tijdschrift voor Mensenrechten), which is published four times a year by the Flemish League for Human Rights (Liga voor Mensenrechten). From September 2014 until August 2015, she was a visiting scholar at the University of California in Berkeley as a Hoover Foundation Brussels Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (B.A.E.F.). During her stay at UCBerkeley, Jozefien worked on her PhD under the supervision of Professor David B. Oppenheimer. She was also an active member of the editorial board of the Berkeley Journal of International Law. During her research stay, Jozefien joined the Berkeley Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law Study Group, of which she is still an active member today.

On 1 December 2017, Jozefien successfully defended her PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. From 1 September 2018 until 31 May 2019, she was a visiting fellow at Harvard's FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. As a Fulbright scholar, Jozefien's research focus at Harvard was threefold: she conducted research on the rights, manifestations of stigma and social and economic inclusion of Roma in the USA, she rewrote her doctoral dissertation for publication with Springer, and she was actively involved in the peer review of articles for the Harvard Law School Human Rights Journal. From October 2019 until February 2022, Jozefien worked as a post-doc research collaborator at the Institute of European Studies (IEE) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In March 2022, she joined the Federal Institute for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights (FIRM-IFDH) as a legal officer.