ABOUT
HRJust, an EU-funded research initiative, investigates the systemic challenge of States using human rights justifications to defend their own actions. Our mission is to analyze these practices and develop mechanisms for enhanced accountability in global human rights governance.
Focus Areas
Examines how human rights justifications appear across different national Covid strategies—from voluntary measures to strict controls. By engaging with civil society, it identifies risks, benefits, and gaps in individual human rights protection when human rights justifications are used during times of crisis.
Explores how States use human rights justifications to defend and legitimize its migration policies and legislation. With a focus on how this affects the individual human rights protection of migrants and persons with migrant backgrounds. Through dialogue with human rights defenders and NGOs, it highlights geopolitical, gender, and intersectional impacts on rights protection.
Studies how States use human rights to justify climate policies. It assesses whether these justifications strengthen accountability or leave people unprotected, and develops recommendations for fair and rights-based climate governance.
An HRJust-developed theory explaining how states use human rights to defend decisions and legislation that often limit individual rights. This shifts the purpose of human rights from protecting individuals from the state to protecting the state itself. Our theoretical framework draws from disciplines such as law, philosophy, and political theory.
An HRJust developed concept for analyzing gender and intersectionality through Covid, Migration and Climate where we merge the theories of gender and intersectionality with vulnerability theory. This is done through an interdisciplinary approach between sociology, anthropology and law, and we call this concept Complex Intersectionality.
Intersect Observatory
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HRJust WP 4 Report the Rights of the Child during the COVID-19 Pandemic vulnerability, intersectionality, and human rights justifications: A Civil Society Perspective
This report examines the human rights and children’s rights implications of the COVID-19 responses in Sweden and Finland, focusing on the balance between conflicting constitutional and human rights and the national structures for civil society engagement during emergencies like the pandemic. Both countries faced the…
Partners
