The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a legal document with global reach and thus has a cosmopolitan imprint. The CRC is the most far-reaching document that explicitly states the rights of children. The convention serves young human beings, the child, and constitute a critical standard that can and should be […]
Breaking BAD: Understanding the Backlash Against Democracy in Africa
Project team: Lise Rakner (Project leader), Leonardo Arriola, Siri Gloppen , Kendra Dupuy, Vibeke Wang, Fiona Shen-Bayh, Svein-Erik Helle (post-doctoral fellow) and Lisa-Marie Måseidvåg Selvik (PhD candidate). Time frame: 08/01/2017-08/01/2021 Project description: Are dictators abusing formal institutions in a backlash against democracy, or are formal institutions increasingly restraining the discretionary power of more-or-less democratic politicians? Most African […]
Suing the State for climate change
Suing the State for climate change is the title for Catalina Vallejo Ph.D project. Vallejo finished her Ph.D.in 2018. About the research project: How do courts around the world hold governments accountable for their failing to mitigate or adapt to climate change? Climate change is a complex global problem and poses a unique challenge for societies and for […]
The Acceptability of Child Protection Interventions: A Cross-Country Analysis
This project examines the population´s values and interpretations of the child´s best interest’s principle within different societies, as well at the courts justifications of their best interest’s judgments. The principle of the child´s best interests is recognized by all states, but it is a principle that is controversial and contested within and between welfare states. […]
Discretion and the Child’s Best Interest in Child Protection
The research project “Discretion and the child’s best interests in child protection” aims to unlock the black box of discretionary decision-making in child protection cases by a comparative-empirical study of how discretionary decisions are made and justified in the best interests of the child. There are huge research gaps in this important area of the […]
Law, Democracy and Welfare
Political, civil and social rights for citizens are prerequisites for a functioning democracy. Furthermore, legal developments in various areas of the welfare state have important implications for the construction of ‘social citizenship’, i.e. the institutional framework which ideally, should ensure citizens’ opportunities to participate in society as equal and free citizens. The focus of the research […]
Safeguarding borders or safeguarding queers
Yngvild Gotaas Torvik has submitted her master thesis on queer asylum, titled “Safeguarding borders, or safeguarding queers – Norwegian perceptions of (in)credible LGBT asylum seekers at the intersection of ‘LGBT friendly’ norms and restrictionalist immigration policies”. This was written as part of the research project Sexual and Reproductive Rights Lawfare: Global battles. The thesis explores […]
Wartime sexual violence against men in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) and Rwanda (1994)
PhD Project for Anna Gopsill The research project aims to analyse the use of wartime sexual violence against men (SVAM) as a politicised weapon of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) and Rwanda (1994). By tracing verdicts from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the project […]
Recognized but not Protected? The Human Right to Safe Drinking Water & Protection of Foreign Investments in Water Utilities
Sara Ekblom has written her master’s thesis in law (UiB) on the right to water in investor-State arbitration. The thesis asks how investor-State Tribunals addresses the relationship between the Argentine Governments’ international duty to realize the human right to affordable drinking water through regulation and policy, and its international duty to accord foreign investors in […]
States’ access to pre-emptive self-defence using high-tech methods.
Oda Ringstad: Master’s project. University of Bergen, 2019. It has been discussed whether a right to self-defence also applies for pre-emptive self-defence, meaning whether there exists a principle that allows a state to use armed forces in self-defence to defend itself against an upcoming attack. The famous Webster-formulation from 1837 states that a state can […]