Antoinette Sprenger | Senior Expert Environmental Justice

Antoinette Sprenger is a senior expert environmental justice at IUCN NL. She focuses on civic space, lobbying for laws and regulations protecting Environmental Human Rights Defenders (i.e. EU Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, the Dutch draft law on IRBC and the UN Binding Treaty on Businesses and Human Rights) and advising local partners on using UN procedures (i.e. the Universal Periodic Review) to bring their causes to the international arena.

Another area of her expertise is the illegal trade in wildlife. To combat this, Antoinette lobbies for better laws and regulations to protect endangered species and works together with local partners to implement monitoring systems to better understand the dynamics of the trade. She uses her legal background to share knowledge with local partners through organising legal trainings on environmental law that empower partners to make better use the existing laws in their countries.

Before she followed her passion for nature and switched careers, she was a corporate transaction lawyer at one of the top law firms and a general counsel of listed companies in the Netherlands.

Her love for nature carries over into her personal life where she volunteered at a Rhino Sanctuary in South Africa taking care of orphan rhino calves after their mothers had been poached.