Géraldine Mathieu

Géraldine Mathieu holds a doctorate in legal sciences from UNamur (Le secret des origines en droit de la filiation, Kluwer, 2014). She is a professor at UNamur's Faculty of Law, where she teaches family law, youth law and the philosophy of children's rights in the specialised Master's programme in an interdisciplinary approach to children's rights.

As co-director of the Vulnerabilities and Societies Centre, she heads up its Children's Rights Unit. Comprising around fifteen members, the Unit focuses on the legal, philosophical and societal significance of children's rights and on the difficulties encountered in Belgium in making these rights effective. The Unit's researchers study, in particular, systems for protecting children's rights; children's vulnerability; children's best interests; children's right to autonomy and participation; children's procedural situation; children's rights in the context of youth welfare and youth protection: the rights of the child in filiation and adoption law; the rights of the migrant child; the right of the child to a non-violent education; the rights of the child in situations of intra-family violence; the rights of the child in the digital environment; the rights of intersex children and the rights of transgender children.

With a view to rethinking traditional university teaching methods in order to involve students as much as possible in a process of co-construction of knowledge and openness to interdisciplinarity, but also with the aim of making them more aware of the realities on the ground and the needs of litigants, it now offers its students the opportunity to get involved in a teaching method based on service-learning. The youth law course gives them the opportunity to get involved in an association whose mission is to help and protect young people, and to make the links between the reality of social issues and the content of the course, while the family law course gives them the opportunity to take part in the DROIGIBUS project - A travelling clinic on the rights of children and families, which aims to improve access to justice for the most disadvantaged parties, first and foremost children.

She is also co-president of the Famille & Droit association, which brings together all the family law professors from Belgium's French-speaking universities, and a member of the editorial board of the Revue trimestrielle de droit familial and the Commission nationale pour les droits de l'enfant.

From 2014 to 2019, she worked for Defence for Children International Belgium (DCI Belgium) as an expert in children's rights. A member of DCI's International Executive Committee, she was vice-president for Europe.