Conny Rijken new National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children
Prof. dr. mr. Conny Rijken will be the new National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children, starting 1 September 2022. She is the successor of mr. Herman Bolhaar, who retired on 23 May 2022.
Conny Rijken is currently professor of Human Trafficking and Globalisation at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Over the last twenty years Rijken has researched and published on many different aspects of human trafficking including labour exploitation, the role of businesses in combating human trafficking and the psychological consequences of human trafficking. In her work, she focuses on exploitation and other human rights violations in the context of global migration.
Prof. Rijken is an elected member of GRETA (Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings), a group of 15 experts monitoring the implementation of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings by the Parties. She was a member of the Dutch Advisory Committee on Migration Affairs (ACVZ), the advisory board of the Dutch Coordination Center on Human Trafficking (CoMensha), and the Dutch victim identification board, endowed with the determination of victimhood in human trafficking cases.
She was director of INTERVICT (the interdisciplinary research Institute on Victimology) and served for ten years as a deputy judge in criminal proceedings. She is trained as a lawyer in international and European law with a specialization in human rights law. Rijken holds a PhD in Law, and published her thesis in 2003 on the prosecution of human trafficking from a European perspective.
The term of office for the National Rapporteur is four years and can be extended once for another four years.