Role: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Ghent University's Human Rights Center
Ghent, Belgium

  Contact: Lourdes.Peroni@UGent.be

  Research Interests:
Equality and Non-Discrimination Law | Law and Religion | Critical Human Rights Theory | Feminist Legal Theory | Gender at the Intersection of Race, Culture and Religion

Lourdes Peroni is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University’s Human Rights Center. After earning her law degree from the National University of Asuncion in Paraguay, she moved to the United States to obtain her LL.M. from Harvard Law School and later to Belgium to get her Ph.D. in Law from Ghent University. Prior to Ghent, Lourdes was a fellow at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and at Yale Law School. She was also a Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at the American University of Asuncion’s Law School (Fall Semester 2008).

Lourdes’ research focuses on how law deals with the intersection of gender, race, national origin and culture, mainly from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Currently, she is examining the ways in which gender, culture, language, race, and national origin interact in human rights law’s responses to violence against women of migrant background in Europe.

He PhD research was conducted within the framework of the European Research Council-funded project “Strenghtening the European Court of Human Rights: More Accountability Through better Legal Reasoning“, The thesis uncovered cultural and religious inequalities in the European Court of Human Rights’ case law on freedom of religion, respect for family life and language, and suggested ways to avoid such inequalities. Lourdes is co-editor of and contributor to the “Strasbourg Observers,” a blog commenting on recent developments in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights.