Stephan Parmentier studied law, political science and sociology at the universities of Ghent and Leuven (Belgium) and sociology and conflict resolution at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (U.S.A.). He currently teaches sociology of crime, law, and human rights at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the University of Leuven, and coordinates the Research Line on Human Rights and Transitional Justice at the Leuven Institute of Criminology. He also serves as the Vice Dean for International Relations at the Faculty of Law and Criminology and a Member of the university-wide Ethical Commission on Dual Use, Military Use and Misuse of Research.
He is the Secretary-General of the International Society for Criminology (Paris) since 2010, an Advisory Board member of the International Centre for Transitional Justice (New York and Brussels) since 2014, and he was on the Advisory Board of the Oxford Centre of Criminology between 2010 and 2023. He is currently a Scientific Advisory Board member of the Hannah Arendt Institute in Mechelen, and between 2018 and 2020 served on the Scientific Council of the Museum for Holocaust and Human Rights also in Mechelen. Several of his EU-funded multi-year exchange projects were selected as ‘good practices’ by the European Commission. In November 2017 he received the Award ‘Third Way’ from the Serbian Society of Victimology for his research on a non-conflict and comprehensive approach to dealing with war and war crimes. In May 2022, he was accepted as a member of the Academia Europaea, Class of Social Sciences, for the quality of his international scholarship.
Stephan Parmentier is the founding general editor of the first international book ‘Series on Transitional Justice’ (Intersentia Publishers, Cambridge/Antwerp) since 2007, and founding editor of ‘The International Journal of Restorative Justice’ (Eleven Publishing, The Hague) since 2013. He co-founded and co-directs the Flemish Interuniversity Research Network on Law and Development and co-organised for many years the summer courses on Human Rights for Development. In 2016, he established the Fund on Transitional Justice at KU Leuven, and in 2020 he co-founded the international Academic Network on Memory, Truth, and Justice, with colleagues from Argentina, Belgium and Spain.
