At the end of June, Mariette Grange, the GDP’s long-time advisor and senior researcher, retired after a distinguished decades-long career as a Geneva-based human rights advocate specialising in the rights of migrants and refugees. Mariette has been a part of the GDP team since its inception: first as an advisor to and then member of a research team at the Graduate Institute of International Studies that founded the GDP as a student-led academic research project in 2005; later as senior researcher after the GDP became an independent non-profit research centre in 2014.
Among her many achievements at the GDP, Mariette was responsible for developing and growing the GDP’s engagement with the UN human rights system, spearheading our submissions project and helping ensure that immigration detention remained on the agenda during relevant debates, meetings, hearings, and sessions of UN treaty bodies and special mechanisms. Among her final activities with the GDP was Mariette’s co-authorship, with GDP colleagues Michael Flynn and Izabella Majcher, of the book Immigration Detention in the European Union: In the Shadow of the “Crisis” (Springer, forthcoming).
Mariette’s achievements before joining the GDP included co-establishing the Amnesty International office to the UN in Geneva and providing leadership to Human Rights Watch during the institution-building years of the UN Human Rights Council. She also worked on migrant and refugee operations at the World Council of Churches and the International Catholic Migration Commission and on emerging issues at the International Council on Human Rights Policy.
Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Mariette will immediately recognise the patent impossibility of filling her shoes. She will be greatly missed—though we are delighted that she has agreed to continue on as an informal external advisor. We still have so much to learn from Mariette! The GDP team wishes her all the best in the adventures ahead.
