Joni Van Laeken started as a Meijers PhD Candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies in September 2023. Her PhD research is titled 'Centering Victims in Atrocity Crime: To What Extent Facilitate (Inter)national Criminal Justice Mechanisms Transformative Reparations?'.

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Joni Van Laeken holds an LLB and an LLM in Criminal Law from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Belgium. She also obtained an Advanced LLM in Public International Law with a specialisation in International Criminal Law at Leiden University in 2022. Afterwards, from September 2022 until March 2023, she did a legal internship at the Trust Fund for Victims of the International Criminal Court in The Hague where she was mainly working on reparations related matters in the situation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Her PhD research titled 'Centering Victims in Atrocity Crime: To What Extent Facilitate (Inter)national Criminal Justice Mechanisms Transformative Reparations?' seeks to investigate to what extent reparations awarded to victims through existing (inter)national criminal justice mechanisms do and/or could facilitate transformative goals for victims of atrocity crimes living in (post-)conflict societies through comparative and empirical research, and by adopting an actor-focused approach. In doing so, her research aims to uncover the (institutional) factors that hinder or facilitate the realisation of transformative goals through reparations and this from the perspectives of diverse actors involved in reparative processes.