Dr. Merel Vrancken graduated with a Master of Laws at the Catholic University of Leuven in 2019. She then joined Hasselt University as a PhD student (2019-2025), where she conducted doctoral research on human rights and educational segregation. She successfully defended this PhD in October 2025. She is currently an affiliated researcher at Hasselt University and a lecturer at PXL University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
During her PhD trajectory, Merel has built up expertise on segregation in education, the right to education and the principle of equality and non-discrimination, with especial focus on the ground of socioeconomic status. Aside from this, she is interested more broadly in inclusive education, discrimination of persons with a disability and religious signs in education.
In 2023 she won the Jonathan Cooper OBE prize for her paper on 'Segregation in education and a duty of desegregation under the European Convention on Human Rights', published in European Human Rights Law Review 2024 issue 2.
Merel Vrancken is a member of the editorial team of the academic blogs Strasbourg Observers and Tijd voor Mensenrechten (a Belgian Human Rights blog) and the editorial board of Tijdschrift voor Mensenrechten (Belgian Journal of Human Rights Law). In 2020 and 2021, she co-organised the first two editions of the Young Legal Researchers Conference.
PhD project: Human rights and educational segregation: great expectations? A critical legal analysis of human rights law’s potential to address educational segregation
This research project aims to critically analyse the possibilities and limitations of human rights law in addressing the problem of segregation, with a specific focus on societal (‘de facto’) segregation on the basis of socioeconomic status. For this, Flanders is used as a case study. Social science studies show that segregation in education is both widespread and generates unequal educational opportunities. This is especially true for segregation on the basis of socioeconomic status, which is omnipresent in a system that divides children into different tracks and schools on the basis of merit, such as the Flemish system. Educational segregation on the basis of this ground thus disadvantages already disadvantaged children, while education is typically seen a forum that equalises opportunities. While virtually all human rights law instruments contain a prohibition of discrimination, only very few include an express prohibition of segregation. This project investigates to what extent prohibitions of discrimination in human rights law also prohibit (all forms of) segregation in education. It moreover examines whether segregation on the basis of socioeconomic status is and can be prohibited in human rights law.
Supervisor: prof. dr. Stijn Smet
Co-supervisor: prof. dr. Jan Theunis
Doctoral Committee: prof. dr. Eva Brems and prof. dr. Wouter Vandenhole
Duration: sept. 2019 - sept. 2025