This year, the trial concerned a case dating back to July 2025: an illegal rave party, gathering some 1,200 people having been held at Ohey, near Namur, in the middle of a protected natural area. "This case is linked to this year's Fil Rouge, "Réenchantons la Terre".It involves a case that caused significant damage to nature, but also acts of violence, with and without a discriminatory motive, between a participant and a local resident", explains Emma Bourcelet, assistant at the Faculty of Law and co-organizer of the event. "In particular, the idea was to show how environmental criminal law can be a tool for defending nature."

Seven students carefully prepared their speeches, each in a different role: Théophile Renier, Aurélie Lemmens, Albiona Sefedini, Louis Jaspard, Dorien Huys, Nateo Carnot and Laly Vadevorst. The staff surrounding the project included: Nathalie Colette-Bazecq, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Amani Pici, PhD student, Amélie Lachapelle, UNamur doctorate in legal sciences, ELSA Namur (European Law Students' Association) and Emma Bourcelet.

Special guests

The Faculty of Law welcomed two guests: Julien Moinil, King's Public Prosecutor in Brussels and didactic collaborator in criminal law, who presided over the court during the mock trial, and Sarah Coisne, judge at the Liège Court of Appeal, who had provided the real case file that served as the basis for the facts submitted to the students.

"Julien Moinil's experience as a practitioner and alumnus of the Faculty was a real source of inspiration," Emma Bourcelet points out. "As for Sarah Coisne, she not only contributed to the deliberations for the verdict, but also shared her experience and the diversity of cases in environmental criminal law. The audience was thus able to appreciate the beauty and role of the law in shaping our world in the service of protecting living things. "

The pedagogical benefits of such an exercise for students are numerous! "First and foremost, it's a real collective intelligence process where personalities combine to give a unique color to the project. The rigor imposed pushes participants to develop a legal analysis applied to real facts, which enables them to go beyond pure theory. Building a coherent, relevant argument is an invaluable exercise for their future careers, whatever they may be. Finally, learning to speak, role-play and overcome certain fears is a major challenge. Seeing their evolution in just one month is impressive," enthuses Emma Bourcelet.

On this November 18, the emotion was palpable in UNamur's Pedro Arrupe auditorium. "These students are in their second year, they don't yet have all the criminal law material, they find out about the case a month before the event... and yet, the magic happens!" confides Emma Bourcelet.

The biodiversity crisis isn't just destroying nature: it's also threatening our societies, our well-being and our survival. Based on the scientific assessments and findings of the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), this Francqui Chair will explore our toxic relationship with nature, the global failure to protect it, and the multiple values of living things.

Speaker: Sander Jacobs, Senior Researcher at INBO (Institute for Nature and Forestry), Nature & Society research group, Coordinator of the Urban Nature research program and Visiting Professor at Ghent University.

19/11/2025 - Inaugural lecture | Biodiversity crisis: causes, consequences, and how (not) to get out of it.

This Francqui Chair offers a fresh look at the advances but also the tensions that today characterize the way the law organizes society's relationship with the environment. If the ambition to protect the environment has indeed become a legal issue, how are its essential mainsprings evolving, whether in climate matters, in the relationship to human health, or in the status accorded to nature?

The organization of this Chair is fully integrated into the Law School's Fil Rouge 2025-2026 dedicated to this substratum essential to life that is the environment, nature, our earth: "Réenchanter la terre".

Orator: Delphine Misonne, Senior Research Fellow FNRS, Professor at UCLouvain, Director of CEDRE and member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.

27/11/2025 - Inaugural Lesson I Protecting the environment beyond politics

The Digital Sessions are an initiative launched by the NaDI, the digital research institute at UNamur. The latter brings together researchers from the Faculties of law, informatics and EMCP.

To stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration, NaDI has launched a call for projects. One of the selected projects? Les Séances du Numérique, an original format in which fiction becomes the starting point for debate. Each meeting begins with a film screening, followed by an interdisciplinary conference on a digital-related social issue.

The ambition of these sessions is simple: to educate about digital issues through fiction, and to confront a variety of viewpoints.

This format extends the experience of the podcast Pop-Code already hosted by Anthony Simonofski and Benoît Vanderose, but with an added dimension: interdisciplinarity and direct exchange with the audience. After the film, everyone can question the experts and enrich the reflection.

Digital technology will be at the heart of future screenings, with a dynamic that is both collaborative and rooted in current affairs:

1. Fostering collaboration between several NaDI centers to bring disciplines into dialogue (as was the case at the first session with CRIDS and PReCISE).
2. Bouncing off themes linked to current events to guarantee the relevance of exchanges.

Four sessions will be offered per year, open to all, with one priority: reaching out to citizens. The films are there to give the event a cultural and scientific outreach.

Eventually, the team would like to diversify its formats: screenings in cinemas like Caméo, broadcasting series, even playconferences where we play a video game during the debate. The idea: to use fiction in all its forms to kick-start discussion.

• Fanny Barnabé, lecturer at CRIDS / NaDI
• Anne-Sophie Collard, professor at the EMCP Faculty
• Anthony Simonofski, professor at the EMCP Faculty
• Benoît Vanderose, professor at the Computer Science Faculty

In collaboration with the Knowledge Confluence and the Administration de la communication

Several projects are already aiming to entrust part of the legislative work to artificial intelligence (AI). While for the time being, these are mainly tools for transcribing parliamentary debates, translating or analyzing archives, drafting tools or legislative texts are also being considered. The use of AI may seem interesting: it can improve readability or facilitate standardization. But, depending on how it is used, it may not spontaneously respect the fundamental principles of the legislative process, such as legality, proportionality or equality. These requirements, established by the Constitutional Court, are the subject of numerous case law decisions. As part of a doctoral thesis, Aline Nardi, is sifting through them to see whether the use of AI is possible in legislative processes.

His finding? "For csome more critical tasks, which go beyond simple editing, problems arise." In particular, she points to the opacity of the reasoning, since "it is difficult to trace why the AI suggests such and such a lead from the query submitted to it". Yet, in a state governed by the rule of law, the legislative process must be transparent and comprehensible if it is to be challenged by parliamentarians and citizens.

There are also issues of democratic legitimacy: "The company that develops the system used by parliamentary assemblies can influence decisions that are extremely important for a nation. Is a parliamentarian still useful if he or she is only there to ratify decisions made by a machine?" asks the jurist.

On the citizens' side, AI has been transforming election campaigns for some years now. Micro-targeting, automated disinformation, manipulation of emotions via social networks: these are all formidable tools that can skew public debate. The 2016 US presidential campaign clearly illustrates this problem."Cambridge Analytica, for example, targeted and influenced undecided voters whose positions could be tilted in Donald Trump's favor. Around 20 million undecided voters thus received tailored messages, such as memes, videos, blog posts in favor of Trump", recalls Aline Nardi. Combined with social networks, AI therefore calls into question the right of voters to form an opinion based on pluralist and reliable information.

More recently, the Romanian Constitutional Court invalidated the 2024 presidential election on the grounds of misuse of AI and lack of transparency in digital campaigns. "This affected the freely expressed nature of the citizens' vote and in particular their right to be properly informed, explains Aline Nardi.

The European Union is trying to take action against these abuses. Several regulations have been put in place. They aim to frame digital technologies and limit their harmful effects on the information space, particularly during electoral processes. These regulations include the Digital Services Act (DSA), the AI Regulation and the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising Regulation (TTPA). These regulations have prompted Google, and more recently Meta, to stop allowing political, electoral and social issue advertising in the European Union.

"However, questions remain as to the applicability, concrete implementation and effectiveness of certain standards stemming from bodies of digital law", alerts Aline Nardi, who calls for "sortir de ce flou juridique".