The following research projects are currently being conducted at the Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights.” Additional projects are in development and will be added regularly.
Taking Rightsholders Seriously: From Stakeholder Engagement to Rightsholder Empowerment in Transnational Business Contexts
Markus Beckmann, Markus Krajewski, Almut Schilling-Vacaflor
The project assesses participation as a human right from a theoretical (foundational and normative) and practical perspective, with a focus on transnational business contexts. On a theoretical level, the project asks how a human rights-based concept of participation can be developed in a non-hierarchical and transdisciplinary manner involving rightsholders themselves, how participation is construed from the perspective of international human rights law and how human rights and environmental due diligence laws and practices need to be transformed from the perspective of rightsholder participation as a human right. Empirically, the project will evaluate real-world experiences with participation in global value chains focusing on activities related to the global energy transition in four Latin American countries, which are connected to companies that fall under the German Supply Chain Due Diligence act or the French Duty of Vigilance law. The project will address all three dimensions of the Cluster and contribute to the megatrends of fragmented economic globalization and planetary environmental crises. It combines law, anthropology, political science and business management in a multi- and interdisciplinary way. Through the involvement of rightsholders in the design and implementation of its research agenda, the project also adopts a transdisciplinary approach, exploring methods of participatory research.
Protecting migrant rights and democratic rights through law: Friends, foes or strangers?
Grażyna Baranowska, Başak Çalı
This project aims to examine the entanglements and disentanglements between the legal practices to protect migrant rights and democratic rights across Europe. Focussing on legal practices in Denmark, Germany, Greece, Poland, Turkey and the UK domestically and supranationally, it asks whether and how real-world experiences to protect migrant rights and democratic rights though law are entangled or disentangled, for what reasons and with what consequences. The project will achieve this through a transdisciplinary research design. It will bring the academic literature on migrant rights, democratic rights and autocratic practices in conversation with the everyday experiences of the legal practices of human rights spanning migrant rights and democratic rights in. The project does not start off with a working hypothesis of this relationship in practice, rather it will adopt a reflexive stance with the view of exploring whether the meeting of the academics and human rights law practitioners may produce new forms of knowledge and practices at the intersection of migrant rights and democratic rights.
Absolute Rights under the ECHR at State Borders
Grażyna Baranowska, Anuscheh Farahat
Some human rights are absolute, meaning that no interference is permitted under any circum-stances. One example is Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. This provision is also of central importance in migration cases, as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has derived from Article 3 the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits states from returning, persons to a country where they would face a real risk of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Yet, current debates, including in the ECtHR itself, question the absolute character of state obligations under Article 3 in migration context and whether absolute rights may be restricted in their procedural limb. The workshop – and the following collected volume – provides an occasion to embed context-specific discussions regarding the absolute char-acter for rights in migration context, in broader research of absolute rights under the ECHR. This debate is relevant not only for the protection of migrants’ rights but also for the broader under-standing of absolute rights, as any narrowing of their interpretation or application may have spill-over effects on other contexts in which absolute rights are relied upon.