Johan Vande Lanotte
Johan Cyrille Corneel Vande Lanotte (born 6 July 1955) is a Belgian politician. He is a member of the SP.A, and became its party president on 15 October 2005. He handed down his leadership positions after the SP.A lost in the 2007 general election. Between 1995 and 2014, he served more than 13 years as Deputy Prime Minister, the longest period for a Flemish socialist after WW II. In his last term he served as the Minister of Economy, Consumer affairs and North Sea in the Di Rupo I Government. With the formation of a new Centre -Right federal government, which excluded his party, Johan Vande Lanotte returned to local politics in October 2014 in Ostend, where he took up his position as alderman for the economy and tourism at Ostend City Council. From August 2015 until the end of 2018 Vande Lanotte was the mayor of Ostend. During his political career he continued to work as a professor at the University of Ghent, specialized in Constitutional Law and Human Rights. Since 2019, he is a lawyer (senior legal advisor) in the law office Van Steenbrugge in Gent. He was the initiator of the Turkey Tribunal held  in Geneva in September 2021 Studies. In 1978 he graduated magna cum laude in Political and Social Sciences, option: Sociology (Master's degree) from the University of Antwerp. In 1981 he added, again magna cum laude, a master in Law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He graduated as Doctor in Law at the Ghent University in 1986. The subject of his dissertation was "decentralisation in the Belgian political context". It was awarded with the Prize of the Belgian Institute for Administrative Sciences. During his doctorate, he studied at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law (Lausanne) with the Von Calcken scholarship  of the Council of Europe, at the Lille University (France), the Leiden University (Netherlands) and the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec.