Jacquelyn MacLennan is a partner at White & Case, based in Brussels, Belgium. She focuses on European Union competition and trade law, in addition to human rights, and has substantial litigation experience before the EU courts. She worked with Romanian non-governmental organization ACCEPT in Case C-673/16 Coman and Others, which achieved the recognition of same-sex marriage throughout the EU. This received the Financial Times 2018 “Innovation in the rule of law and access to justice” award. Jacqui set up White & Case’s Business & Human Rights Group and advises companies in the fast changing environmental, social & governance (ESG) legal and litigation landscape, as well as on supply chain compliance and slave, trafficked, and child labour. She has spoken widely on the responsibility of business to respect human rights, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Jacqui leads White & Case’s Global Pro Bono Practice and is actively involved in the African Centre on Law & Ethics, where she teaches business and human rights to law students and young lawyers. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Europa Institute of the University of Edinburgh. She has been named one of the Top Ten Innovative Lawyers in Europe by the Financial Times, and twice been recognized as “Best in Competition & Antitrust” by the Euromoney Women in Business Awards. She has been a visible advocate for equality for women in the profession throughout her career and is included in the First 100 Years UK video project, charting the journey of women in law since 1919.
Jacqui has long been interested in how law is used to justify and perpetrate atrocity, and how this can be resisted and prevented. She said:
The catalyst was my experience, after a year of Edinburgh University Law School, of working at a kibbutz in Israel and a period with the Palestinian community in East Jerusalem. I cooked with and for Holocaust survivors at the kibbutz, but it was only after visiting Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Center) that I realized the complexity of what happened.
Since then I’ve spent time teaching in Bosnia and Rwanda, and considering the role of law and the legal order in reconciliation. We are all a party to the genocides which continue in the world, as the internet and media bring them literally into our hands. AIPG is an organization which does remarkable and essential work to make change.