The Human Rights “Antonio Papisca” is close to the family and colleagues and to all those who knew and appreciated Prof. Koen de Feyter, who suddenly passed away last Friday, September 21

The University Center for Human Rights “Antonio Papisca” is close to the family and colleagues and to all those who knew and appreciated Prof. Koen de Feyter, who suddenly passed away last Friday, September 21.

Koen de Feyter often collaborated with the Center, particularly as part of his active involvement in the teaching and research activities promoted by the European Master's Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation (EMA) and the European inter-university Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation - now the Global Campus of human rights, based at the Venice Lido.

In the late 1990s, Koen actively collaborated with Prof. Antonio Papisca in developing the curriculum of the EMA program, of which he then served as Director in the 2004-2005 academic year. Itinerant seminars, master classes, clusters and specialization seminars, which still characterize EMA today, are all results of this effort that served both to define and consolidate a common core of the program and to facilitate a differentiated and personalized learning experience for students.

Koen has been a guest of our university on numerous occasions, in particular invited to bring his scientific and educational contributions to the annual conferences and summer schools conducted by the Center.

As a component of the Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development of the United Nations, he had initiated and was among the main animators of the study project on Law and Development, which our Center had also joined. Our Center had also particularly appreciated his scholarly contributions on the topic of the local application of international human rights norms (“localising human rights”) and the crucial role of cities and territories in this field.

Beyond his extraordinary figure as a jurist and researcher, open to all fields of social studies and also to the dimension of the arts (he was for many years the coordinator, in Venice, of a summer school on cinema and human rights), Koen was a sincere friend and a sure reference for the Center's faculty, PhD candidates, and students who came into contact with him. Gone is a person of great scientific depth, intellectual honesty, rich humanity, and endowed with an innate kindness of spirit.