Elevating water rights to human rights: Has it strengthened marginalized peoples’ claim for water?

Abstract: Water scarcity remains a huge problem in many countries, especially where a growing population compete with demands for water from industry and agriculture. In 2010, a United Nations General Assembly resolution recognised the right to safe and clean drinking water as a human right. However, the actual impact of this relatively new human right to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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:  How are courts around the world holding governments accountable for failing to mitigate or adapt to climate change? Through content analysis of court decisions in cases against governments around the world, the study examines where and how citizens […]