Lieneke Slingenberg has been awarded a NWO Veni grant for research on human rights and refugees. This grant allows highly promising researchers to conduct research for a period of three years.

Human Rights Law, Non-Domination and Spatial Restrictions for Refugees
Lieneke Slingenberg received the grant for her research project “Human Rights Law, Non-Domination and Spatial Restrictions for Refugees”, dealing with how European states increasingly subject refugees and (rejected) asylum seekers to spatial restrictions. This implies that states employ coercion to limit refugees’ possibility to leave or stay in a particular location, including evictions, forced transfers, destructions of dwellings and penalties for leaving an assigned residence. Lieneke Slingenberg will investigate the (lack of) domestic, European and international regulation of such restrictions and if and how the legal system can provide better protection against domination: the possibility of arbitrary interference.

Lieneke Slingenberg
Lieneke Slingenberg is Associate Professor and Head of the Section Migration Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She received her LL.M. in International Law and Constitutional and Administrative Law in 2005 (cum laude) and her PhD in 2012, both at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In her research she focuses on the intersections between social security law and migration law, in particular on the social rights of irregular migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. In her work, she analyses how states use the provision of and/or exclusion from social rights as an instrument of migration control and how this relates to human rights law. In 2014 she published a monograph, based on her doctoral research, on state obligations under refugee law, international social security law and international human rights law with regard to the reception of asylum seekers (Hart Publishing). From February until June 2018 she was a fellow at NIAS, where she studied the legal reasoning employed by the European Court of Human Rights in cases about migrants’ destitution.

NWO Veni Grants
The Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Veni is a grant for researchers who have recently obtained their PhD to conduct independent research and develop their ideas for a period of three years. The Veni is awarded by Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) every year. A total of 1,115 researchers submitted an admissible research proposal for funding. In this round, 154 of these have been granted.