Goedele Liekens is a Belgian politician for Open Vld (Flemish Liberals) and a clinical psychologist and sexologist. She was a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) from 1999. In 2001, she visited Botswana to observe the effects of HIV there. She reported on it to a UN conference and to the Belgian parliament. A year later she was in Afghanistan to contribute to the reproductive health of Afghan women. Afterwards, she made the case for combating childbirth fistula and for better sex education in developing countries, among other things. In 2019, she was elected as a Belgian Federal Member of Parliament where she went on to serve in the Belgian Committee for Foreign Affairs and Development Cooperation, Advisory Committee on Emancipation and the Special Committee on the Belgian Colonial Past. Since 2019, she has been active as a member of the executive committee of European Parliamentary Forum for sexual and reproductive health and as a Champion of Shedecides. In her legislative work, she always focuses on women’s rights, sexual and reproductive rights and the fight against sexual violence. Since her inauguration, she has written dozens of resolutions on topics such as sexual and reproductive rights in Belgian development policy, rape as a weapon of war during the war in Ukraine and sexual violence in eastern Congo.
Goedele Liekens
