At a prize-giving ceremony on 3rd December 2025, Professor James Davey, the immediate past President of BILA was pleased to award the 2025 BILA Journal Article Prize to Kathleen Defever for her article ‘Access to Insurance and Economic Inclusion: Microinsurance as a Fundamental Right?’. The article is published in issue No. 137 (2025) of the BILA Journal.
Kathleen is a Doctoral Fellow in Insurance Law at Ghent University in Belgium. Her article examines how microinsurance supports fundamental rights, such as the right to property, the right to equality, the right to socioeconomic well-being, the right to self-determination, and the right to development. She develops a sophisticated and rigorously researched argument of microinsurance as fundamental human right that considers the characteristics of insurance and microinsurance, and how fundamental rights are defined, granted, and enforced.