Joni Van Laeken has been a Meijers PhD Candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies since September 2023. Her PhD research is titled 'Centralising Victims in Atrocity Crime: Do Transformative Reparations Work?'.

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Joni Van Laeken holds an LL.B and an LL.M in Criminal Law from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Belgium. She also obtained an Advanced LL.M in Public International Law with a specialisation in International Criminal Law at Leiden University in 2022. Afterwards, from September 2022 until March 2023, she did a legal internship at the Trust Fund for Victims of the International Criminal Court in The Hague where she was mainly working on reparations related matters in the situation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Her PhD research titled 'Centralising Victims in Atrocity Crime: Do Transformative Reparations Work?' seeks to investigate the transformative nature of existing (inter)national reparative practices for victims of atrocity crimes living in (post-)conflict societies through empirical and comparative research. In doing so, her research aims to provide greater clarity on both the prospects and limits of existing reparative practices in achieving transformative goals from a victim-centred perspective.