Projects since 2018

This project seeks to investigate the ways in which Cold War politics shaped Portugal’s accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention in 1960, fourteen years before the Carnation revolution marked the country’s break from authoritarian rule. While scholars have examined the relationship between the Cold War and Portugal’s membership in the NATO alliance, the context of its accession to the Refugee Convention remains largely uncharted. This is visible not only in the literature on the Estado Novo, but also in the scholarship on Cold War international law, part of which has explored how the Cold War shaped international refugee law.

RIseEU proposes a 72-hour teaching programme on Key Fundamental Rights Issues in the European Union (EU) to be held at NOVA School of Law in Lisbon. The project seeks to provide a comprehensive assessment of the key fundamental rights issues in the main areas of EU action, with an in-depth analysis of migration and asylum. Two Master-level courses will be offered: ‘Key Fundamental Rights Issues in the EU’ and ‘Key Fundamental Rights Issues in EU Migration and Asylum Law’. In the last two decades or so, a series of crises and developments have shaken the EU, posing fundamental rights challenges. The treatment of migrants and asylum seekers, the climate crisis, the rule of law backsliding in some Member States, the energy crisis in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the artificial intelligence ‘revolution’, have all sparked heated debates on fundamental rights issues and the role of the EU therein. Taking seriously EU’s ambition as a beacon of human rights and recognizing the important steps it took so far, RIseEU will assess the extent to which the EU delivers on its commitments and if this requires amendments to its current legal or institutional framework. Given the numerous critiques of the soon to be adopted New Pact on Migration and Asylum, special attention will be given to migration and asylum.

SINPL-EU is the first course combining EU Intellectual Property (IP) Law and Sustainability. It is a 36-hours curricular course held at NOVA School of Law in Lisbon, complemented by a 24-hours preparatory course on Foundations of IP law and a 10-hours Online Writing School component, the latter being open to the students of all the project partner universities. The need to combine EU IP law and Sustainability comes from the nature and evolution of this legal discipline: the EU is expanding its harmonization of IP rules and modernizing them to promote sustainable goals. EU IP law is becoming a fundamental part of law school curricula across the EU. However, there is a lack of learning activities on the intersection between IP and Sustainability. This is a highly problematic gap, as IP law is central to incentive all industry sectors towards technological and cultural innovation. SINPL-EU aims to fill this gap. It provides a high-profile learning experience for students passionate about EU law, IP law, and Sustainability studies.

The project aims at building a permanent network of scholarly reflection, joint research, exchange of methodologies, and advocacy to strengthening regional integration and cooperation in and between Africa and Europe. Through shared values and initiatives, the project seeks to establish an academic infrastructure to redesign the EU-Africa relationships for next generations, allowing both regions to better address: region-specific critical issues with major spillover effects; regional and trans-regional governance; economic, political, and decision-making interdependencies; ever-growing global challenges and quests for a multipolar international system. It further aims at strengthening African integration through a careful analysis of the experience of European integration.

NEAR-ER (Network on Europe-Africa Relations – Education and Research) brings together 20 HEIs from Europe (7) and Africa (13) with the shared goal of advancing a broad and well-informed conversation on EU-Africa relations by collecting, reviewing, debating, and disseminating innovative research and education materials. The network will establish a systematic process for collecting up-to-date and innovative materials that will empower our partners to deepen their own research and education agendas and promote well founded dialogue on EU-Africa relations with all relevant stakeholders.

As organised crime networks operate across borders, use legal loopholes and advanced technology, it is notoriously difficult to detect and trace hidden and illicit money flows. In TRACE, partners will co‐create innovative data management solutions combined with AI analytics to enhance the capabilities of law enforcement agencies in tracing and recovering illicit money flows and generating court‐proof e‐evidence.

The need for advanced academic training in insurance was widely felt and identified both by academics and representatives of the industry across Europe and the world. The Jean Monnet Module on EU Insurance Law: Challenges in the SDG Era (EUInsLSDG) aims at filling a double gap: by providing advanced training that prepares the next generation of top-qualified legal professionals in insurance, ready to enter the market equipped with the instruments to face the challenges of our time, as well as preparing early-stage researchers, by encouraging state-of-the-art academic research in this field in those areas where both the regulators and the regulated require research outputs that will help them substantiate future decisions.

nEUfam is a 60h course in European Union Family Law held at NOVA School of Law, Lisbon. The course addresses the issue of the pressure that changing family structures and family norms can exert on the future of the European project and whether the EU is equipped to respond to these changes. With evolving family and fertility patterns, the increasing incidence of families that do not align with the traditional model of family, and “culture wars” around family-related matters erupting across Europe, especially in illiberal contexts, the course supplies essential insights to rethink EU legal frameworks in ways that account for these shifts. It especially seeks to understand whether the EU can play a role when it comes to promoting the rights of non-traditional families, and the extent to which this requires amendments to the current legal framework and architecture of the Union. It furthermore assesses the threats to European integration posed by illiberal rules and parties by analyzing their instrumental use of traditional family norms to weaken the EU.

For the development of the project, which will last 18 months (1 September 2022 to 29 February 2024), the legal and institutional anti-discrimination frameworks in different countries (Germany, Sweden, Greece and Norway) will be analysed, with a particularly detailed analysis of the Norwegian experience, through a partnership with Egalia. The focus of this project will be on discrimination based on sex, racial/ethnic origin, sexual orientation and gender identity and disability, also considering the specific socio-economic consequences of each type of discrimination.

This project brings together an international group of researchers from different disciplines (philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, international relations, history, law, cultural studies, literature) who have been conducting research for several years on issues of cosmopolitanism in its personal, social, cultural, political and legal dimensions. COSMOPOLITISM: Justice, Democracy and Citizenship without Borders supports and promotes the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through awareness-raising and reflexivity and by advancing a vision of a just world. In particular, the following objectives are envisaged: