Stephen Parmentier - Biography#

Stephan Parmentier studied law, political science and sociology at the universities of Ghent and Leuven (Belgium) and sociology and conflict resolution at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (U.S.A.). He currently teaches sociology of crime, law, and human rights at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the University of Leuven, and coordinates the Research Line on Human Rights and Transitional Justice at the Leuven Institute of Criminology. He also serves as Chairperson of the Interfaculty Council of Development Cooperation at the University of Leuven, Vice Dean for International Relations at the Faculty of Law and Criminology and Member of the university-wide Ethical Commission on Dual Use, Military Use & Misuse of Research. He previously served as Coordinator of international relations in criminology, Chairperson of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, and Academic Secretary of the Faculty of Law and Criminology.

He is the Secretary-General of the International Society for Criminology since 2010, and since many years also a member of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Centre of Criminology and the International Centre for Transitional Justice (New York and Brussels). He is currently a Scientific Advisory Board member of the Hannah Arendt Institute in Mechelen, and between 2018 and 2020 served on the Scientific Council of the Museum for Holocaust and Human Rights also in Mechelen. Several of his EU-funded multi-year exchange projects were selected as ‘good practices’ by the European Commission. In November 2017 he received the Award ‘Third Way’ from the Serbian Society of Victimology for his research on a non-conflict and comprehensive approach to dealing with war and war crimes.

All over the globe he has served as a visiting professor (Aix-Marseille, Oñati, San José, Sydney, Tilburg, Tokyo, Venice), visiting scholar (Buenos Aires, Harvard, Oxford, Stellenbosch, Sydney) and guest lecturer in the fields of human rights, justice and peace, criminology and socio-legal studies. Stephan Parmentier is the founding general editor of the international book ‘Series on Transitional Justice’ (Intersentia Publishers, Cambridge/Antwerp) since 2007, and founding editor of ‘The International Journal of Restorative Justice’ (Eleven Publishing, The Hague) since 2013. He co-founded and co-directs the Flemish Interuniversity Research Network on Law and Development and co-organised for many years the summer courses on Human Rights for Development. In 2016, he established the Fund on Transitional Justice at KU Leuven, and in 2020 he co-founded the international Academic Network on Memory, Truth, and Justice, with colleagues from Argentina, Belgium and Spain. He also serves as a referee to the ERC and COST funding schemes of the European Union, and several national and international research foundations. His research interests include political crimes and transitional justice, human rights and migration, and restorative justice and peacebuilding. He has conducted fieldwork in Bosnia/Serbia, Central and Southern Africa, and Central and South America.

Over the past quarter century he has been an advisor and consultant to the Belgian Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Justice, the Belgian Federal Police, the King Baudouin Foundation, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, and several non-governmental organisations. In September 2018 he was appointed by the Belgian Minister of Justice on the 3-person expert committee for the establishment of a national human rights institution in Belgium, which took effect in 2020. Between 1999 and 2002 he served as the vice-president of the Flemish section of Amnesty International.