Sara Lembrechts

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Biography

Sara Lembrechts is a PhD researcher at the Migration Law Research Group at Ghent University. She studies children’s rights in appellate asylum proceedings in Belgium, using a multidisciplinary approach of legal ethnography. Her research is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ellen Desmet and embedded in the interfaculty Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) and the Human Rights Centre (HRC).

Sara has a Master’s in Children’s Rights and Childhood Studies (Berlin, 2013), an LLM in International Laws (Maastricht, 2011) and a Bachelor in European Studies (Maastricht, 2009). Before starting her PhD, she worked as a researcher and policy advisor for the Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre (KeKi, 2012-2020). In addition, she was involved in several research projects about children’s rights and child abduction (University of Antwerp, 2016-2020).

During her studies, Sara interned with the UNICEF Liaison Office at the United Nations in Geneva (2011), with the Belgian National Commission on the Rights of the Child (2010) and with Amnesty International in New Zealand (2008).

Her publications and research interests cover children’s rights, human rights, child participation in legal proceedings, child abduction and knowledge management. She co-authored the Children’s Rights Legal Commentary on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Protocols (Edward Elgar, 2019) and was co-editor for the Routledge International Handbook of Children’s Rights Studies (2015).