Joke Swiebel

Joke Swiebel was born on 28 November 1941 in The Hague, Netherlands. Her mother worked as a kindergarten teacher prior to marriage and her father, Cornelis Marinus Swiebel,[1][2] served as the general secretary of the Social Insurance Council. He also was a member of the South Holland Provincial Council. A grandfather had served as a Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDWP) member of the Hague City Council.[1] She attended the Montessori Lyceum in the Hague, graduating in 1960 and continued her education at the University of Amsterdam where she studied political science.[3][4] In 1963, Swiebel joined the Dutch Labour Party, which was a successor of the SDWP.[1] She graduated with a candidate degree in 1972 and completed graduate studies in library science in 1973.[1]

In 1968, Swiebel was elected as the national chair of the newly formed Federatie Studenten Werkgroepen Homoseksualiteit (Federation of Student Working Groups on Homosexuality, FSWGH).[2] The group was an umbrella organization, which coordinated activist associations of LGBT students in Dutch universities.[5] Working with the Ruimte Youth Center, the FSWGH organized the first LGBT protest in the Netherlands.[2] In January 1969, Swiebel and other members of the group handed out a pamphlet and a bag of candy hearts to the members of the States General of the Netherlands at the Binnenhof in the Hague to protest Article 248bis of the Dutch Criminal Code.[6] The article established the age of consent for same-sex relations at 21 and for heterosexual relations at 16, as a method of discouraging homosexuality.[2][6] She resigned from the FSWGH presidency in 1969 to accept a post on the board of the Cultuur en Ontspanningscentrum (Culture and Leisure Center, COC), a social organization for the LGBT community which had been established in 1946.[2][5] Initially her work with the COC focused not on activism, but on forming a legal association.[2] In 1971, the year that Article 248bis was abolished, she left the COC board.[1][2]

Swiebel ran the political science library at the University of Amsterdam between 1972 and 1977.[1] From 1973, she worked feminist groups like the Man Vrouw Maatschappij, coordinating actions to include sexual orientation in the fight against discrimination.[2][7] She served on the University of Amsterdam's Grewel Committee in 1974 and 1975, organizing the university's women's studies program.[1] In 1977, she began to work on the national emancipation committee, a government body that aimed to establish policy for women's economic independence and pay parity.[1][8][9] She became head of the Emancipation Policy Coordination Office in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment in 1982 and served in that capacity until 1995. Simultaneously, Swiebel began serving as the head of the Dutch delegation for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 1988 and was the vice chair of the commission in 1992 and 1993. She continued her service until 1995 and that year led the Dutch delegation for the United Nations' World Conference on Women, held in Beijing.[1] The purpose of the conference was to create a strategic plan for the global efforts to support women's right to self-determination.[10]

From 1995, Swiebel worked in various positions at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, simultaneously serving as the chair of the Council of Europe's Steering Committee for Equality between 1989 and 1999.[1] That year, she was elected as a member of the European Parliament and served until 2004. During her tenure, Swiebel was involved in legislation and produced reports which focused on free movement of persons throughout the European Union (EU), including asylum and migration laws. She proposed anti-discrimination legislation and an expansion of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, although her proposal in 2003 to adopt same-sex marriage for the EU was rejected until 2004. She worked on expanding equal opportunities and treatment of all persons in the member states and stressed the need to analyze the impact of anti-terrorism policies on human rights, noting that police misconduct and judicial deficiencies often impacted citizen's rights. [1][11]

After retiring from politics, Swiebel continued her activism, attending the International Conference on LGBT Human Rights, hosted at the 2006 World Outgames in Montreal. She was one of the primary drafters of the Declaration of Montreal.[12] Her published works focus on human rights and policy. In articles such as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Human Rights: The Search for an International Strategy, she has analyzed the different stances between the EU and the UN with regard to their ability to protect rights. Scholars like Elizabeth Baisley and Kathleen A. Lahey have noted Swiebel's conclusion that the diversity in member states of the UN makes its policies more susceptible to conservative, traditional and religious pressures than those policies adopted by member states of the EU.[13][14] Among many other contributions, she served as the chair of the Dutch Coordination of the European Women’s Lobby and on the board of the International Archives for the Women's Movement from 2005 to 2007. The following year, she became chair of the International Gay and Lesbian Information Center and Archive, serving until 2012. Between 2013 and 2017, Swiebel was chair of the Clara Wichmann Association for Women and Law.[1] In 2019, Swiebel was awarded the Ministry of Emancipation's Jos Brink Oeuvre Prize, for her lifetime of work on behalf of the LGBT community.[15][16]

• Swiebel, Joke (April 1988). "The Gender of Bureaucracy: Reflections on Policy-Making for Women". Politics. London: Political Studies Association. 8 (1): 14–19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9256.1988.tb00230.x. ISSN 0263-3957. OCLC 5960354836. S2CID 145558531.
• Swiebel, Joke (1999). Unpaid Work and Policy-Making: Towards a Broader Perspective of Work and Employment (Report). New York, New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. OCLC 44610822.
• Swiebel, Joke (12 December 2002). Report on the Human Rights Situation in the European Union (PDF) (Report). Strasbourg, France: European Parliament. Report A5-0451/2002. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 June 2022. Retrieved 7 June 2022.[11]
• Swiebel, Joke (17 December 2003). Report on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men in the European Union (PDF) (Report). Strasbourg, France: European Parliament. Report A5-0481/2003. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 June 2022. Retrieved 7 June 2022.[11]
• Swiebel, Joke (2009). "2. The European Union's Policies to Safeguard and Promote Diversity". In Prügl, Elisabeth; Thiel, Markus (eds.). Diversity in the European Union (1st ed.). New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 21–38. ISBN 978-0-230-10416-7.
• Swiebel, Joke (March 2009). "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Human Rights: The Search for an International Strategy". Contemporary Politics. London: Taylor & Francis. 15 (1): 19–35. doi:10.1080/13569770802674196. ISSN 1356-9775. OCLC 362957296. S2CID 154229358.
• Swiebel, Joke; van der Veur, Dennis (December 2009). "Hate Crimes against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Persons and the Policy Response of International Governmental Organisations". Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights. Utrecht, Netherlands: Studie- en Informatiecentrum Mensenrechten. 27 (4): 485–524. doi:10.1177/016934410902700403. ISSN 0924-0519. OCLC 7023054990. S2CID 151457434.
• Swiebel, Joke (September 2019). "Het einde van artikel 248bis Kantelpunt in de relatie tussen de homobeweging en de overheid" [The End of Article 248bis: Tipping Point in the Relationship between the Gay Movement and the Government]. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (in Dutch). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press. 22 (3): 231–248. doi:10.5117/TVGN2019.3.002.SWIE. ISSN 1388-3186. OCLC 8275599479. S2CID 214397883.