Aagje Ieven
Aagje Ieven is Secretary General of Missing Children Europe, where she is responsible for the organisation's strategic development and day-to-day management.
She has an academic background in Health Sciences (KU Leuven), Political Philosophy (KU Leuven and Radboud University Nijmegen) and Law (KULeuven and Columbia University, New York), and has almost twenty years of experience in research, policy analysis and advocacy on human rights and child protection in Europe. Before joining Missing Children Europe, she worked with several European civil society organisations focused on the rights and wellbeing of children and families, including coordinating advocacy campaigns and managing European membership networks.
At Missing Children Europe, Aagje's work focuses on research, training, advocacy and service quality. She has contributed to the development of the organisation's research and training programmes on children who run away, online grooming and child sexual exploitation, and has led a number of projects aimed at improving knowledge and data on missing children and the vulnerabilities associated with child disappearance. She has also supported advocacy efforts that contributed to the inclusion of missing children in key European child rights, child protection, and family policy frameworks.
Alongside her management role, Aagje regularly contributes to training and knowledge-sharing activities for professionals working in child protection, family policy and related fields. She is a certified family mediator and guest lecturer in International Family Mediation at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences.
She currently leads Missing Children Europe's work on international child abduction and child alert systems, supporting cooperation and exchange between organisations and authorities across Europe.
Melissa Kucinski
Melissa Kucinski is a lawyer and mediator based in Washington, DC and New York. Her practice focuses exclusively on international family law. She chaired working groups on international family mediation for International Social Service and the American Bar Association. Ms. Kucinski has trained judges on the Hague Abduction Convention in Maryland, California, Florida, and is designing a year-long curriculum for the New York State Judicial Institute on international family law. She designed and taught the international cross-border family mediation training for the University of California Law San Francisco.
Ms. Kucinski participated on U.S. delegations to the Hague Conference’s Sixth Special Commission meeting and to meetings in Tokyo, Japan in 2014 to advise on the implementation of the Abduction Convention after Japan’s ratification. While in Tokyo, she trained the first round of mediators with the Tokyo Bar Association to mediate these complex cases. Ms. Kucinski also served on delegations to the Seventh and Eighth Special Commission meetings.
She serves as a member of the Uniform Law Commission’s Joint Editorial Board on Uniform Family Law and has served as an advisor or observer on drafting committees for various acts, including the amendments to the Uniform Child-Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act for implementation of the Hague Child Protection Convention at the state level. She is the Reporter of the Uniform Judicial Interviews of Children Act. In September 2024, Ms. Kucinski testified before the U.S. Congress on international parental child abduction legislation.
Prof. Bettina Heiderhoff
Bettina has been Professor of Private International Law, International Civil Procedure and German Private Law at the University of Münster since 2013. She is also Director of the Institute for German and International Family Law at the University of Münster. From 2006 to 2013, she was Professor of Private Law, with a focus on Family and Succession Law and European Private Law, at the University of Hamburg.
Bettina’s research focuses in particular on the protection of the best interests of the child, both in national and international contexts. She was a member of the project board of the first FAMIMOVE project and has published extensively on child participation, the Brussels II Regulation and issues at the interface of family and migration law.
Jolien Janse
Jolien Janse is Head of Legal and International Affairs at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. From that position she is responsible for the Dutch Central Authority International Children’s Issues, i.e. international child abduction, international child protection and intercountry adoption, and also for the department of legal counselling services in the field of Sanction Law and Protection.
She holds an academic degree in Dutch law (both international and civil law) as well as a Graduate Diploma in Law (UK). She started her career as a legal counsel at the Legislation Directorate of the Ministry of Justice and Security, where she drafted legislation in the field of – mainly – Family Law (e.g. intercountry adoption, domestic violence). She lived and worked in London for four years and also worked as a legal counsel in the field of employment conditions (collective bargaining) for the Police Directorate, also at the Ministry of Justice and Security.
