Past events

The first day opened with Stephanie Triefus (NNHRR Academic Coordinator), followed by Bald de Vries on methodology in legal scholarship — including doctrinal, comparative, empirical, critical and interdisciplinary approaches. Dr Lorena Sosa (UCERF; EQUALS) led a workshop on the Question Formulation Technique, and Brenda Oude Breuil and Vassilis Gerasopoulos addressed researcher positionality and participatory action research.

The first day closed with a panel on critical perspectives in research, chaired by Kyra Wigard, with Luísa Pinto e Netto, Rébecca Franco, Alexandra Timmer and Karin de Vries. The panel examined the place of critical race theory, critical feminism, queer and post-colonial theory in legal scholarship — and the enduring gap between these frameworks, which are well suited to analysing structural dominance, and the doctrinal emphasis of many law curricula. Participants joined a canal boat tour and dinner at The Street Food Club in the evening.

The second day broadened the methodological toolkit. Vassilis Gerasopoulos and Marilena Drymioti introduced critical discourse analysis as a tool for examining how structural inequalities and ideological assumptions are embedded in legal and policy texts. Amr Marzouk led a session on digital ethnography. Damian Zaitch addressed the semi-structured interview as a qualitative method, and Sarju Sing Rai closed the substantive programme with a session on citizen science and co-creation in legal research — including how to work with communities often excluded from the research that shapes law and policy.

The training offered PhD candidates a methodological vocabulary for engaging seriously with structural inequality and systemic discrimination, and for designing research that responds to — rather than simply documents — the conditions of inequality it studies.

The programme opened with mini keynotes from two UN Committee members participating online. Patsili Toledo (UN CEDAW Member; Co-Chair of CEDAW’s Working Group on Gender-based Violence against Women) addressed trans rights under CEDAW, and Helene Tigroudja (Vice-Chair of the UN Human Rights Committee) examined trans rights under the ICCPR. Their contributions set the treaty body context for the discussions that followed.

The first panel, Transfeminist Futures in International Law, chaired by Jet Tigchelaar, moved from treaty body jurisprudence to concrete legal developments across jurisdictions. Türkan Ertuna Lagrand examined gender identity-based asylum claims in the EU; Emma Ravenhorst presented comparative litigation perspectives from the Netherlands, Bulgaria and France; and Lorena Sosa reflected on legal developments around (trans)femicide, tracing the distance between visibility and substantive justice. The panel made clear that formal legal recognition, however necessary, leaves the deeper structures of inequality largely intact.

The second panel, chaired by Vashti Ortego, Transfeminist Futures and Movement Building, centred trans-led organising as a site of knowledge and strategy. Emmie Wienhoven (COC Netherlands) addressed trans rights advocacy at the United Nations; Kaye Candaza (STRAP; Filipino LGBT Europe) and Umay (Stichting Prisma Groep) generously shared both personal accounts and expertise that made the current tensions and shortcomings strikingly visible, and Jay Hamilton (MamaCash; Count Me In! Consortium) shared concrete ways how the Count Me In! Consortium seeks to foster and strengthen (trans)feminisms. The panel examined transnational solidarity, community-led advocacy strategies, and the relationship between legal reform and grassroots organising.

The event was organised by Vashti Ortego, a transfeminist activist and exchange student at Utrecht University working on global advocacy through the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. It produced a sustained dialogue between doctrinal legal analysis and activist expertise, and pressed the central question of whether international human rights law can move beyond formal recognition toward the structural transformation that transfeminist scholarship and practice demand.

The seminar demonstrated what becomes possible when equality law, family law and the institutional analysis of health systems are brought into sustained conversation: a sharper account of how structural conditions — not only individual claims — produce and entrench unequal access to health. The contributions will be published as a blog series in the coming months.

Dr Karin de Vries (EQUALS coordinator) opened the afternoon. Dr Tina Stavrinaki (SIM, Member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination) delivered the keynote on the right to equality and non-discrimination in health, drawing on her work as Rapporteur for CERD General Recommendation 37.

The first panel, chaired by Franka van Hoof (SIM, EQUALS, European Equality Law Network), addressed health determinants and structural inequalities. Dr Leigh Haynes (Simmons University) examined the scaling of AI in health care and its implications for the right to health; Dr Rachel Horton (University of Reading; European Equality Law Network) analysed how EU equality law may be mobilised to address gender inequality in access to healthcare; and Dr Femke de Kievit (Molengraaff Institute; UCERF) presented on equality in the legal protection of vulnerable older adults, drawing on the interdisciplinary STRIDE project.

The second panel, chaired by Dr. Lorena Sosa (SIM; UCERF; EQUALS coordinator), turned to sexual and reproductive health rights. Christina Zampas offered an assessment of the state of international human rights law on sexual and reproductive health, and Lilianne Ploumen (Bureau Clara Wichmann; former Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation) reflected on sexual and reproductive rights in the Netherlands.

A third panel considered the institutional dimensions of health inequality, chaired by Dr. Türkan Ertuna Lagrand (EQUALS, RENFORCE, UCERF). Dr Matthijs Smakman (Utrecht University of Applied Sciences) spoke on social robotics and emerging inequalities in digital health, and Dr Eduardo Arenas Catalán (Open University) examined the relationship between philanthropy and inequality. Dr Lorena Sosa delivered the closing remarks.