Founder

“No individual has sufficient experience, education, native ability and knowledge in any undertaking without the cooperation of other people. Surround yourself with people who together create a reservoir of intelligence. When these brains work together in harmony, the intelligence of each is available to all and virtually anything is possible.”

Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Gather4Humanity has been established upon my personal experiences, observations, and beliefs. 

From early childhood all through my studies and career I have been interested in international relations, human rights and peaceful conflict resolution. 

As a migration professional for 25 years, I have witnessed, heard, felt and seen the impact that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide have on victims, witnessess, their respective families and on entire societies.

As a migration professional I have been fortunate to render safe haven to victims seeking justice, while on the other hand denying safe haven for perpetrators that were fleeing justice.

In the 1990s, I was a pioneer in detecting, investigating, and assessing asylum applications of alleged war criminals from conflicts in Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia,  Afghanistan and Rwanda. During this period, the first ad hoc tribunals were established in The Hague, a city renowned for peace, justice, and security.

In 2005, I became the operational manager of the Dutch specialist war crimes / exclusion unit. A team of 25 specialists responsible for detecting, investigating, and assessing asylum and migration applications of alleged war criminals. As such I have been involved in many high-profile cases, in finding resolutions and innovative approaches for key  challenges and played a significant role in national and international capacity building, as evidenced by  the Human Rights Watch publication "The Long Arm of Justice, Lessons from Specialized War Crimes Units in France, Germany, and The Netherlands."

In all, I spend over  10 years in spearheading new (inter)national and multidisciplinary approaches aimed at optimizing the identification of and the administrative responses to migrants responsible for core international crimes:

• 2009-2010: national program manager to intensify the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for core international crimes, drafting a common national strategy and establishing a Task Force;
• 2010-2015: coördinator and developer of the Exclusion Module of the European Union Asylum Agency’s Asylum Curriculum, providing a 20-hour e-learning module and two days of face-to-face training for European immigration officers on detecting, investigating, and assessing alleged war criminals;
• 2013 -2015: project manager "Arab Spring and Beyond: Safeguarding the Integrity and Support for International Protection," aimed at identifying war criminals from the Middle East;
• 2015-2016: leveraging my extensive network, I initiated two international conferences that resulted in the EUAA’s Exclusion Network, which now collaborates closely with Eurojust’s Genocide Network.

During the 2015/2016 refugee crisis I was appointed deputy head of the General Director's Office and head of the Integrity Unit of the Dutch immigration service. Subsequently, I explored new routes in open innovation to combat impunity for core international crimes, focusing on optimizing prevention, detection, identification, and responses to these crimes.

I built Gather4Humanity on a simple conviction: everyone should be able to pursue their future without fear or forced displacement.

Twenty-five years in refugee protection and international-crimes accountability taught me something the field rarely says out loud — we keep reacting to crises we could have caught earlier, because the things that actually stop impunity rarely work together.

That conviction became a framework. I believe accountability only holds up when four layers reinforce each other:

• Strategy — Leadership and Governance set the direction and hold it accountable.
• Tactics — Knowledge, Skills, Tools and Network are how that direction gets organised and equipped.
• Operations — Insights & Oversight run continuously beneath the work itself, through Awareness, Prevention, Detection, Response, Recovery and Learning.
• Impact — a safer, more just world, achieved through accountability, with less human suffering and fewer people forced to flee.

Most institutions are strong on one or two of these layers. Almost none are built for all four to work as one system. Gather4Humanity is.

I didn't arrive at this from theory. I arrived at it from a decade running a war-crimes unit, coordinating an EU-wide training curriculum, and building the integrity function of a national immigration service — watching, case after case, exactly where the chain breaks.

As a dedicated, pragmatic and purpose driven professional I seek to:

• promote human rights standards 
• further compliance and enforcement of key international principles
• contribute to prevention, accountability, truth, justice and reconciliation
• to  reduce human suffering and refugee flows
• connect, inform, empower and inspire  like-minded people, partners,  organisations and professionals