Call for research contributions

For years, the research department at the Danish Institute for Human Rights has been carrying a research agenda devoted to the critical understanding of the role of national institutions in upholding human rights commitments and implementing policies. Part of the research has focused on how international and regional organisations, peer networks and national human rights institutions can contribute to developing guidance and support to state actors.

In this line, Stéphanie Lagoutte, Sébastien Lorion and Steven L. B. Jensen co-edited a special issue of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights dedicated to the theme of the domestic institutionalisation of human rights. This special issue was published in December 2019. The introductory article is in open access and presents the general approach and research agenda of the Institute on institutions.

Building on this work, the research department at the Institute is now launching a new research initiative, aimed at generating and exchanging research on a specific type of national human rights actors, namely governmental human rights focal points. These include human rights ministries, national mechanisms for implementation, reporting and follow-up, inter-ministerial committees on human rights, and so forth.

“These actors are increasingly the focus of international guidance especially coming from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights but they remain largely under-researched. This is quite opposite from the independent national human rights institutions. We would like to contribute to the generation of academic knowledge on national human rights actors that is stemming from various disciplinary perspectives,” says Sébastien Lorion, PhD Fellow at the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

In the

, the Institute is seeking new pieces for a panel proposal for the September 2020 Conference of the Association of Human Rights Institutes in Pretoria and for the publication of a human rights journal’s special issue on governmental human rights focal points. Read for additional details.

Interested researchers are invited to contacts Stéphanie Lagoutte (sla@humanrights.dk) and Sébastien Lorion (selo@humanrights.dk) by the end of January 2020.