Raphaëlle Godts

Focus

Raphaëlle joined ClientEarth in August 2021. She develops and implements legal strategies to prevent deforestation in West and Central Africa, particularly in Ghana. Concretely, she supports the legal capacity of civil society and other stakeholders to take part in the design and implementation of stronger legal frameworks around forest governance, community rights and forest-risk commodities, specifically cocoa.

Experience

She graduated in Law at the Catholic University of Louvain-La-Neuve in Begium. She also obtained a Certificate in Transnational Law at the University of Geneva, Switzerland as well as a master’s degree in human rights at the University of Saint-Louis, Belgium. She qualified as a lawyer in Belgium (admitted to the Brussels Bar) and completed her training in Brussels working for a top-tier law firm.

Education

Through her academic training and professional experience, she has specialised in human rights and environmental law. Before joining the Brussels Bar, she completed internships at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the human rights desk of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the European External Action Service. She then worked as an environmental lawyer for a Belgian corporate law firm in Brussels for 3,5 years, but quit for a job with UNODC in Mauritius where she was engaged in a maritime crime programme.

Working at ClientEarth offers me the ideal framework to develop, with very inspiring colleagues and partners, innovative measures for the protection of forests and the people who depend on them around the world.