20th February 2025Dr. Lex Takkenberg will spell out the basic facts about the Agency’s mandate, history and work on behalf of Palestinian refugees. A Dutch National, he is Senior Advisor on the Question of Palestine at ARDD, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development, in Amman. From 1989 until 2019, he worked in various field and headquarters positions with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, most recently at its Amman headquarters as the agency’s first Chief Ethics Officer. He was previously UNRWA’s General Counsel, Director of Operations, and (Deputy) Field Director in Gaza and Syria. Before joining UNRWA, he was the Legal Officer of the Dutch Refugee Council, from 1983 until 1989. A law graduate from the University of Amsterdam, where he also worked as an Academic Assistant from 1987-1989, he obtained a Doctorate in International Law from the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1997 after having successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law. Oxford University Press (OUP) published a commercial edition of the dissertation in 1998; an integral Arabic translation was published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in 2003. A new version of the book – co-authored with Francesca Albanese – was published, also with OUP, in 2020.