Sarah El Amouri

Biography

Sarah El Amouri is a guest professor at the VUB's Faculty of Law and Criminology, where she teaches the course on Migration Law. Since the academic year 2026-2027, she also co-teaches the course on European and International Law in the LLM in International and European law and in the Advanced Master on European Governance, together with Prof. dr. Wout De Cock at the Brussels School of Governance. Besides her academic engagements, Sarah works as a law clerk to the President of the Belgian Council for Alien Law Litigation (RvV-CCE).

Sarah El Amouri holds a Ph.D. in Law from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2024). She completed her legal studies at that same university in 2018, graduating summa cum laude and first of the graduating year, for which she was granted the 2018 René Marcq Prize. During her studies, she completed several internships, among others, as a research assistant to Prof. dr. Stefaan Smis, the Embassy of Belgium in Qatar and the Legal Service of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Public International Law). After graduating in 2018, she spent five months at the Directorate-general European Affairs and Coordination of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served as a Deputy Antici (Coreper II) at the Permanent Representation of Belgium to the EU for another five months as a Bernheim laureate. After this 10-month traineeship, she joined the Centre for International Law of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel as a PhD student and teaching assistant.

From November 2020 to October 2024, Sarah was a PhD Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) under the supervision of Prof. dr. Stefaan Smis. During her PhD trajectory, she completed different visiting research stays, amongst others at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg (Germany) and the Lauterpacht Center for International Law at Cambridge University (United Kingdom). Sarah successfully defended her thesis “Regulating Business in Illegal Occupations: the Duty of Non-Assistance Revisited” in October 2024.

Her broad research interests are general public international law, business in armed conflicts, state responsibility for potentially harmful conduct of corporate actors (due diligence), the law of occupation and Belgian and European migration law.