What justice looks like up close: the Kavien Justice Award nominees
The Kavien Justice Award recognises LUC Bachelor’s theses that connect scholarship to justice, human rights, peace, and accountability. This year’s nominees show what that looks like when research stays close to people, places, and decisions that carry consequences.
From this group, one nominee will this Friday (3 July) be selected as the second Kavien Justice Award winner, Milena de Roode Torres Georgiadis was in 2025 the first winner, and will receive a trophy and a prize of € 2.000. Set up in memory of Kavien Suleiman (Begikhani), the prize looks for work that holds academic ground and also travels beyond it. Each nominated thesis makes a clear claim about how responsibility is organised, where rights fall short, and what accountability might require.
Kavien started at LUC in 2016 and passed away on 27 November 2021 at the young age of 27. Kavien was born in Kurdistan (Iraq) and raised in the Netherlands. In addition to his studies, he was an active ambassador for peace and international justice, particularly for the cause of the Kurdish people.
Will Chan (World Politics): Belonging beyond the legal promise
A national self-image can be persuasive until you test it against daily life. Will Chan draws on six interviews with queer university students from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau in the Netherlands to examine how belonging is built, denied, and negotiated. The conclusion challenges the idea that freedom arrives automatically with progressive law: participants described racism and exclusion that shaped friendships, access to queer community, and the ability to feel at home, with race repeatedly mediating who is welcomed and who is sidelined.
Uriel Banchik Almasia (Culture, History and Society): When proof has to be built
In post dictatorship Argentina, accountability often begins with excavation. Uriel Banchik Almasia studies forensic anthropology as cultural translation, showing how professionals turn human remains into reconstructed identities and narratives of violence with probative value, while material traces from clandestine detention centres can corroborate survivors’ accounts of torture. Rather than treating evidence as neutral, the thesis concludes that what remains are understood to 'prove' emerges through a network of actors, including courts, families, and human rights organisations, each attaching different meanings to the same objects.
Madelyn Smith (World Politics) : protest filmed in motion
Videos of women dancing in Iran have circulated for years, and this thesis treats them as political texts. Madelyn Smith analyses #danceisnotacrime and #danceforIran videos up to 2025 through feminist theory, iconographical analysis, and an interview with a diasporic activist. Her conclusion is that protest is carried through choices visible on screen, including location, attire, and dancing itself as an illegal act for women in public, and that sharing these videos pushes back against censorship by making agency harder to erase. She also flags a risk in how the movement is received: outside attention can slip into victimising frames that focus on punishment and tragedy rather than on deliberate resistance.
Daphné Gelot (World Politics): Neutrality under pressure in Paris
Food distribution can look apolitical until you watch how it is managed. Daphné Gelot studies the Armée du Salut’s Ramponeau site in Paris using participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, and finds that neutrality is not a stable organisational position. The thesis concludes that neutrality operates as a protective strategy and a public façade, but it comes with costs that surface on the ground: staff dissent goes unaddressed, discriminatory incidents are muted, and shared precarity stays largely invisible, even when volunteers and beneficiaries are navigating similar insecurity
Juliette Pariente (International Justice): environmental rights on a city map
Planning decisions in Hong Kong decide who lives near shade, trees, and cleaner air. Juliette Pariente links access to urban green spaces to the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, combining legal analysis with empirical patterns in distribution. The conclusion is not framed as a one off policy gap: unequal green space undermines the right’s substantive and procedural elements, and the pattern persists because green space is treated as a market commodity rather than an entitlement, with participation and access to justice skewed towards commercial and professional actors.
These theses show why the Kavien Justice Award is already becoming part of LUC’s identity. They do not ask readers to accept justice as an aspiration; they show where it is made, where it breaks down, and what it would take to treat rights and accountability as practical commitments