FEATURED AUTHOR
Stijn Smet
Stijn Smet is a legal scholar. His current research - in comparative constitutional law - investigates the balance between religious diversity and social cohesion in constitutional democracies. He hypothesizes that the way the law deals with religious diversity in different constitutional democracies is informed by explicit or implicit reliance on political theoretical concepts like assimilation, toleration, respect and recognition.
Biography
Stijn Smet is the author of 'Resolving Conflicts between Human Rights: The Judge's Dilemma' (Routledge, 2017), in which he proposes a novel framework for the resolution of human rights conflicts.Stijn Smet is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University Law School (Human Rights Centre) and will start as Postdoctoral Fellow at Melbourne Law School (Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies) in March 2017. He studied law at Ghent University (2001-2006) and human rights at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (2006-2007). Afterwards, he worked for a human rights NGO in Brussels, the European Commission Delegation to the Sudan, an educational NGO in Rio de Janeiro and the Belgian Ministry of Justice, before returning to academia to obtain a PhD in Law (2009-2014).
Education
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PhD in Law, Ghent University, Belgium (2014)
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Stijn Smet's past academic research focused on human rights conflicts and has resulted in the Routledge (2017) book 'Resolving Conflicts between Human Rights: The Judge's Dilemma', in which he proposes a novel framework for the judicial resolution of human rights conflicts.
His current research - in comparative constitutional law - investigates the balance between religious diversity and social cohesion in constitutional democracies.