Koen De Feyter In Memoriam

It is with shock and profound sadness that we in the Global Campus of Human Rights have received news of the sudden, untimely death of our friend and colleague Koen De Feyter.

Koen loved Venice. He loved the programmes and institutions that we have jointly established in the Monastery of San Nicolo: the European Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation (EMA), the European Inter-University Centre for Humann Rights and Democratisation (EIUC) and the Global Campus of Human Rights (GCHR). And motivated by this devotion, he has for a quarter of a century contributed to and left an indelible imprint on EMA, EIUC and GCHR endeavours in countless different ways.

Koen was a regular teacher in the EMA programme from the very beginning. Representing the Maastricht University Faculty of Law, he was in the late 1990s responsible for organising an EMA teaching week on human rights and development titled ‘globalisation and inequality’. This early engagement was emblematic of Koen’s lifelong commitment to human rights as a vehicle for global social justice (see, for example Human Rights: Social Justice in the Age of the Market, Zed Books 2005). Being loaded with interactive exercises, discussion fora and an elaborate simulation event (the ‘Agani village conference’), the teaching week moreover provided a venue for his equally profound dedication to ‘student-oriented learning’.

In the academic year 2004-2005, Koen stepped up his involvement and assumed the role of resident EMA Academic Coordinator / Programme Director. The EMA curriculum was at the time benefitting from an amazing diversity of inputs; its characteristic structure was beginning to crystallise but was not yet clearly defined. Koen therefore initiated a comprehensive curriculum review, which led to the distinction between a ‘first stream’ of mandatory and mostly plenary curriculum components organised in five thematic sections and a ‘second stream’ of elective course components conducted in smaller interactive groups. Rolling seminars, master classes, clusters, and skills seminars, which remain hallmarks of EMA to this day, are all outcomes of this curriculum development effort, which served both to define and consolidate a common programme core and to facilitate a differentiated, personalised learning experience for the participating students. Being a staunch supporter of student-led initiatives, Koen established a ‘lounge’ in the monastery, envisioned as a student-controlled space to which visiting lecturers and experts could be invited at the end of a teaching day to further explore aspects of their teaching, or any current issues, in a relaxed, interactive atmosphere.

Towards the end of his year in Venice, Koen pursued another personal passion and took initiative to establish an EIUC (since Global Campus) Summer School on Cinema, Human Rights and Advocacy. He engaged filmmaker and photographer Nick Danziger and EMA graduate Claudia Modonesi in the initiative, and 19 years later they still remain responsible for the scientific coordination of this annual event organised by the GC project and training department in the Monastery of San Nicolo at the time of the Venice International Film Festival. Koen’s own teaching in the summer school tended to focus on exploring the importance of, and possible limits to, freedom of expression in the arts. This a theme that he has also elaborated in a more recent pioneering Global Campus undertaking, namely the music and human rights project leading to publication of the Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights, Routledge 2022, to which he contributed a chapter.

Following a remarkably intense year in Venice, Koen assumed the position of Chair and Professor of International Law at his alma mater, the University of Antwerp. This provided a platform for him to further deepen the academic interests characterising his EMA involvement. As convenor of the Law and Development Research Group at the University of Antwerp, he has remained a leading voice in this field leading, inter alia, to assuming editorial responsibility for the Encyclopedia of Law and Development, Edward Elgar 2021.

Soon after his return to Belgium, Koen launched an innovative inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional research initiative on ‘localising human rights’ that engaged scholars and PhD researchers in an exploration of how the international and national/regional human rights frameworks respond, or fail to respond, to local aspirations for social justice and change. The contours of this visionary research agenda were traced in a jointly edited publication The Local Relevance of Human Rights, Cambridge University Press 2011, and Koen was since able to support doctoral students to conduct comparative research in this area in different countries worldwide, including Bolivia, China, DRC, and India.

In the course of his years at the University of Antwerp, being no longer directly affiliated with an EMA-participating university, Koen nevertheless remained a regular teacher in the master’s programme, almost always on topics related to human rights and development and in many instances also on human rights and economic globalisation, intersections between business and human rights, and responsibilities under international law of transnational corporations and international financial institutions.

The right to development was a central theme of Koen’s doctoral dissertation and remained a life-long focus of his work. In the lead-up to the 25^th anniversary of the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development, Koen contributed to the work of the High-Level Task Force mandated by the UN to examine and clarify the normative content and operational implications of this challenging and potentially groundbreaking right (The Right to Development: A Treaty and its Discontents, Asser Press 2016). In 2019, he was appointed to serve as member of an Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development (EMRDT) established by the UN Human Rights Council expressly with the aim of drafting a would-be binding treaty on the right to development. In his final teaching sessions in Venice, Koen shared his experience of this engagement with EMA students both in plenary sessions and in interactive ‘second stream’ master classes – thus coming full circle to the curricular framework that he had helped to put into place almost two decades earlier.

Koen was a dear friend and source of inspiration to many of us in the Global Campus of Human Rights. His unwavering dedication to students and lifelong pursuit of social justice from below was coupled with a remarkable intellectual rigor and visionary intuition.

Koen leaves behind his wife Han Verleyen and children Moya, Nathan, Stan and Jules. Our hearts go out to all of them in this moment of unfathomable loss. We join them in celebration of a life of accomplishments and of Koen’s characteristic unimposing leadership in so many areas, both professional and private. As once stated about Koen, almost in passing, by the EMA founder Prof. Antonio Papisca – ‘that is a person of the highest moral integrity’.

George Ulrich on behalf of Global Campus of Human Rights, Venice