Eva Lievens is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law & Criminology of Ghent University, where she leads the research group Law & Technology. She is a member of the Human Rights Centre, the Crime, Criminology & Criminal Policy Consortium and PIXLES (Privacy, Information Exchange, Law Enforcement & Surveillance). A recurrent focus in her research relates to the legal impact of the design and deployment of technology in today’s society, human and children’s rights in the digital environment, and the use of alternative regulatory instruments, such as self- and co-regulation to regulate tech phenomena (such as Artificial Intelligence). From 2011 until 2015 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Research Fund Flanders. She has extensive experience in supervising fundamental research projects, through her involvement in FWO, IWT/FWO-SBO and Ghent University Special Research Fund research projects as a postdoctoral researcher and (co-)promoter. She currently leads fundamental research projects on the promotion of news diversity through an interdisciplinary investigation into algorithmic design, personalisation and the public interest; on big data and tax audits and on the automated; on anonymisation of jurisprudence; on the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on children’s rights; and on legal qualifications and regulatory approaches in relation to minors and online sexual acts from a children’s rights perspective. Since January 2018, she is a member of Ghent University’s Research Council. In January 2019, together with Ingrida Milkaite, she was awarded the Stefano Rodotà Award by the Council of Europe for their groundbreaking research into the child’s right to privacy and data protection in the digital age.
Eva is a member of the Chamber for impartiality and the protection of minors of the Flemish Regulator for the Media, and the Belgian Film Evaluation Committee (“Commissie Filmkeuring”). She is and has been a member of advisory committees of EU funded projects (B-BICO-project – Connecting Europe Facility; STEP (Societal and political engagement of young people in environmental issues) – H2020; Mandola-project (Monitoring and Detecting Online Hate Speech)- REC); ChildRescue-project) and various working groups advising the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and the federal and Flemish government (such as the Belgian Expert group on fake news and online disinformation).
At Ghent University, Eva teaches ‘European Law & ICT’, ‘European Media Law’, ‘Cybercrime, Technology & Surveillance’, Data Protection Law, and ‘Introduction to Law’. She is the associate editor for the International Encyclopaedia of Laws – Media Law (edited by Prof. Peggy Valcke) and is a member of the editorial committee of Auteurs & Media (Larcier). She is also a contributor to the European Audiovisual Observatory IRIS newsletter for Belgium.
University Degrees
Additional (inter)national (human rights) courses taken
