Kim Lecoyer was a PhD Research Fellow from 2011 till 2015. Her research focusses on legal pluralism and human rights in the context of Belgium and Europe. She is currently working on a research project called Legal Pluralism in Belgium or “Beplulex”, a legal anthropology research on non-state family dispute processes in families with a migrant background in Belgium, funded by Belspo.
Prior to joining the Human Rights Centre in 2011, she earned a Master in Social Psychology (ULB, 2004), a Master in Arabic and Islamic studies (UCL, 2007) and a Master in World Religions, Interreligious Dialogue and the Study of Religion (KUL, 2010), as well as a BA in Law (FUSL, 2008). Her latest master thesis, in world religions, was titled “Women’s call for reform in today’s world religions: Judaism and Islam”; This was an analysis of writings of contemporary female scholars advocating women’s rights and gender equality under Islamic and Jewish religious law. Her current position as a doctoral researcher allows her to combine her interdisciplinary expertise in the domains of law, gender and religion.
The topic of her ongoing doctoral work is a human rights analysis of non-state family dispute handling practices of Muslim families in Belgium. The aim of her PhD research is to examine empirical data regarding Belgian Muslim families, their ways of handling family disputes and related Islamic normative frameworks from a human rights perspective, with a particular attention for gender.
Kim Lecoyer is a board member of ‘KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights’ and President of KARAMAH-EU in Brussels.
She defended her doctoral thesis “Belgian Muslim Women’s Rights in Family Life and Conflict: A Socio-Legal Inquiry” on 1 June 2022.
