Janneke GERARDS
Janneke Gerards (1976) is a professor of fundamental rights at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is affiliated to Utrecht University’s Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice and the department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. She further forms part of Utrecht University’s research focus areas Institutions for Open Societies and Governing the Digital Society. More information and a full list of publications can be found at www.uu.nl/staff/jhgerards.
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 March 2023, she published the second edition of her handbook General Principles of the European Convention of Human Rights with Cambridge University Press. 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 Raphaële Xenidis) and a project to develop a fundamental rights impact assessment (FRAIA) for use of algorithms by Dutch public authorities (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 chair of the Advisory Council of the Netherlands Human Rights Institutes, chair of the Committee for Freedom of Science of the KNAW, and member of the Scientific Committee of the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA). She is also a deputy or auxiliary Judge in the Appeals Court of The Hague (concentrating on fundamental rights cases). 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 and member of the State Commission against Discrimination and Racism.
Gerards further 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 is a member of various law journals in the field of fundamental rights and constitutional law, such as the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, het ECHR Law Review and het Netherlands Yearbook of Constitutional Law.
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 40,000 interested persons.
Janneke Gerards graduated from Maastricht University, the Netherlands, in 1998, with a specialisation in constitutional and administrative law. After graduation, she worked at the Department of Public Law of Maastricht University as a junior researcher and assistant professor. In 2002, she stayed at the University of Michigan (United States) as a visiting researcher. From 2003 until 2011, Janneke Gerards was affiliated to the Public Law Institute of Leiden University, the Netherlands, first as associate professor and as from 2005 as full professor of constitutional and administrative law. From 2011 until 2016, she worked at the Radboud University Nijmegen, first as research professor of fundamental rights law and then as professor of European Law and head of the department of International and European Law.