Janneke Gerards is State Councillor at the Advisory Division of the Council of State of the Netherlands. For one day a week, she is affiliated to Utrecht University as professor of Fundamental Rights in Europe. The research conducted by Janneke Gerards focuses on fundamental rights, equal treatment law, judicial review and constitutional law. The interrelation of the European Convention on Human Rights, EU law and national law plays a central role in her research. She has published extensively on topics such as the argumentative strategies of supranational courts, the future effectiveness of the European Court of Human Rights, the development of fundamental rights by the Court of Justice of the European Union, and general notions and principles of fundamental rights law. In 2023, she published the second edition of her handbook General Principles of the European Convention of Human Rights with Cambridge University Press; for the same publisher, she edited the handbook Fundamental Rights. The European and International Dimension. She has been involved in several research projects on the impact of the platform economy and new technologies (AI, algorithms) on fundamental rights and non-discrimination, such as a project on algorithmic discrimination in Europe (commissioned by the European Equality Law Network, together with Raphaƫle Xenidis) and a project to develop FRAIA, a fundamental rights impact assessment for use of algorithms (together with researchers of the Utrecht Data School).
In 2015, Janneke Gerards was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). She is editor-in-chief of the online open access platform EHRC Updates, which publishes Dutch-language summaries and peer reviewed case-comments to judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU. She serves on several editorial or advisory boards in the field of fundamental rights and constitutional law, such as the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights and the ECHR Law Review.
Next to her work for the Council of State and Utrecht University, Janneke Gerards is a member of the Scientific Committee of the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) and a substitute member of the Venice Commission. In the past, she was member and chair of The Young Academy (part of the KNAW, 2006-2011), member of the State Commission on Reform of the Constitution, member of the Advisory Commission on the Future of Legal Aid in the Netherlands, member of the Social Sciences Council of the KNAW, member of the Human Rights Commission of the Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs, member of the State Commission against Discrimination and Racism, chair of the Advisory Council of the Netherlands Human Rights Institute, chair of the Committee for Freedom of Science of the KNAW, chair of the Research Integrity Commission of the KNAW, and deputy or auxiliary judge in the Appeals Court of The Hague (concentrating on fundamental rights cases).
Janneke Gerards's teaching concentrates on fundamental rights in Europe and the Netherlands, legal argumentation, constitutional law, and technology and public values. She is programme co-ordinator (or 'dean') of the Legal Research Master of Utrecht University, a top-rated two-year master programme focusing on research skills and the development of one's own research portfolio. Together with Antoine Buyse and Paulien de Morree, in 2016, she developed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on human rights in open societies that by now has reached over 50,000 interested persons.