The Evolving Protection of Prisoners’ Rights in Europe

Gaëtan Cliquennois holds dual PhD in Sociology of Law from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, and the University of Saint-Louis, Belgium. From 2010 to 2013, Gaëtan was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the FNRS, Belgium, and worked on human rights in penal and prison matters. He was also Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and at the London School of Economics, UK. Since 2013, he has been a permanent Research Fellow for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Strasbourg, France (SAGE: Societies, Actors and Governments in Europe) and since 2018 at the University of Nantes, France. Since February 2021, he is the Director of Law and Social Change and works in the field of Law and Sociology of Law. As a Visiting Scholar at the European University Institute, he worked on the relationships between human rights and austerity policies. He has also worked on the creeping privatization of human rights and the European justice system. He has expertise in European human rights justice, the potential privatization of this system, litigation, penal and prison policies and management in Europe, and prison monitoring and strategic litigation by prisoners, NGOs and private foundations. In 2014, he was awarded an IDEX by the University of Strasbourg to work on ‘the impact of funding and auditing mechanisms on the protection of Human Rights in Europe in times of crises’. In 2017, he was awarded a grant to work on human rights and pretrial detention for two years by the European Commission.