Daan Smeekens obtained his English-language LLM from the University of Antwerp in 2021, with Sustainable Development and Global Justice as his main module. During his master's, he developed a strong interest in human rights and migration law. As part of this program, he spent a semester at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. From 2022 to 2024, he worked as a research associate at the Institute of Federalism at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Subsequently, he worked for a year as a professional guardian for unaccompanied minor foreign nationals for the Belgian Red Cross Flanders.