Leiden Law School alumnus awarded Max van der Stoel Human Rights award
Alumnus Petri Freundlich received the first prize for his LL.M. thesis in the category Master’s theses and academic articles of the Max van der Stoel Human Rights awards 2017
The ceremony took place on 1 December. Mr. Freundlich won first prize for his thesis titled International Humanitarian Law in Human Rights Courts: a Comparative Analysis Between the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, written in the Public International Law programme of Leiden University. His advisor, Leiden University Assistant Professor Jens Iverson, is extremely proud of Mr. Freundlich’s work.
He states: “Mr. Freundlich’s thesis provides an original contribution to the fields of human rights and international humanitarian law. It focuses on how human rights courts (namely the European and Inter-American courts) take norms of international humanitarian law into account in their case-law. This research shows how norms of humanitarian law affect the interpretation of human rights under the European and the American human rights conventions. It analyses similarities and differences between the two courts and how different rules (whether treaty-based or customary) of humanitarian law affect the interpretation of human rights norms in the courts’ reasoning. Several fundamental human rights such as the right to life or the right to liberty are examined. I hope Mr. Freundlich publishes his work and that it is widely read.”
The Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award was established by Tilburg University and, for several years now, has been awarded by the School of Human Rights Research to research carried out in The Netherlands and Belgium. Since 2002, this award has been called the Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award, in honor of the man who, in that year, left Tilburg University as professor of International Law and who had proven to be an indefatigable champion of human rights.