2 March 2022

“I want to make crossing borders easier”

Hildegard Schneider is set to say goodbye. As professor of European Migration Law and former dean of the Faculty of Law, her career coincided with the foundation and pioneering years of the law faculty. She herself made an important contribution to the profiling of Maastricht University as a ‘European’ university. “Now the university has to get ready for global challenges.”

hildegard schneider

Collaborating disciplines

Crossing national borders, too, requires collaboration between disciplines. “What struck me early on was that borders always give rise to problems in border regions. The coronavirus is no different. Member states have kept their healthcare systems to themselves, which in a crisis leads to absurd situations. National borders have been closed, when it might have been better to close the borders between provinces. Patient exchange abroad is fairly normal, but has been done on the sly during COVID-19. I want to make crossing borders easier for citizens.”

With this in mind, Schneider initiated three multidisciplinary research groups. The Institute for Transnational and Euregional cross-border cooperation and Mobility (ITEM) is a spinoff of the Maastricht Centre for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE). Then there’s the Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage (MACCH), which focuses on art and heritage from a multidisciplinary perspective. Which one is she most proud of? “That’s like asking which is your favourite child. I think all three are equally great.”

Now the university has to get ready for global challenges. Many legal fields are developing in this direction too. Take climate refugees—that’s a global problem. I’d like to see the study programme pay even more attention to the challenges of law and justice on a global scale

Highest scholarly award

hildegard schneider

Just as impossible to answer is the question as to which of her 33 PhD candidates she remembers best. She is willing to name the first two. For starters, Yoeri Michielsen won the Best Speaker Award at the European Law Moot Court Competition. “Yoeri’s dissertation was on the nazification and denazification of the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg judiciary, and he found that the Supreme Court was in the wrong. He obtained his PhD cum laude and received the Research Prize of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, the highest scholarly award in the humanities and social sciences.

“My second was an older lady who I figured was around 70. She was studying the recognition of diplomas and the legal status of interpreters and translators. The manuscript was approved, but I suggested holding off a little because European legislation was in the works. But she was keen to have the defence as soon as possible, and when I received her CV with her date of birth, I thought it must be a typo. It turned out that she was turning 85 the following month! No wonder she didn’t want to wait.”

hildegard schneider

Eating well

Schneider switches seamlessly between the present and the earliest days of the university, then still known as the Rijksuniversiteit Limburg. She talks about the founding of the law faculty in 1981 in the home of the dean, Job Cohen. About the inaugural lecture ‘Compare everything and keep the good’ by her husband René de Groot, a retired comparative law professor, which paved the way for the establishment of the European Law School. Then there was the Maastricht Treaty: “That was a huge stroke of luck for the city and the university. Maastricht was easiest to organise in terms of security, and the French president Mitterrand wanted to be able to eat well. It put Maastricht on the map, which triggered the university’s name change.”

Today, Schneider is genuinely worried about Europe, particularly the developments in Ukraine and Poland. But she sees European unification and European law as a foregone conclusion. “Now the university has to get ready for global challenges. Many legal fields are developing in this direction too. Take climate refugees—that’s a global problem. I’d like to see the study programme pay even more attention to the challenges of law and justice on a global scale.”

By: Hans van Vinkeveen (text), Hugo Thomassen (photography)