Projects FCT R&D

The 'Corporate Respect for Human Rights in Conflict-affected and High-Risk Areas (CAHRA)' addresses the urgent need for robust Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) implementation by companies operating in or sourcing from areas facing conflict. The project directly responds to the evolving legal landscape of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and related regulations. Our core objective is to build the capacity of HEIs in both Colombia and Ukraine, enabling them to act as sustainable regional hubs for HRDD training and expertise. Key activities include intensive 'Train-the-Trainer' programs for university faculty (equipping them with in-depth knowledge of international law, EU regulations, and conflict-sensitive HRDD), collaborative curriculum development workshops (creating new and updating existing HRDD training modules tailored to the specific challenges of each region), stakeholder engagement workshops (fostering partnerships between HEIs, businesses, government bodies, civil society organizations, and local communities), and the creation of an open-access online resource platform. CAHRA will benefit over 400 participants, including university professors, researchers, students, local businesses, and civil society representatives. 5 key outputs: training modules, practical HRDD guidelines, toolkits for businesses, policy briefs, and an online platform.

Developed in response to the growing need for graduates of excellence with leadership potential in international law and global security affairs, this unique two-year Erasmus Mundus Master Degree leverages the complementary expertise, resources and networks of six leading European Universities to continue a uniquely innovative, integrated and multidisciplinary program in International Law of Security, Peace and Sustainable Development (ILSPSD). ILSPSD is designed to train the next generation of lawyers and policy-makers equipped to engage with the political context of international law and the holistic approaches that are needed to achieve security, peace and sustainable development. As such, ILSPSD will spearhead an innovative approach to 21st century legal education that is urgently needed for our increasingly volatile, interconnected and complex global future. The program is taught over 24 months and includes at least three mandatory mobility periods. All students will spend the first term in Lüneburg and the second term in Barcelona, where focus will be on, respectively, international law and international relations of security, peace and sustainable development.

“Kalsada” is a Filipino word that comes from the Spanish “Calzada”, used to name the Roman vias (or “calzadas”) – the backbone of Europe – and to indicate the existence of a paved road that joins and merges different areas and populations. In our context, CALSADA – a hybrid between the Filipino and Spanish words - represents a joint Filipino-European effort and commitment; a symbiosis of collaboration with a purpose of union. RSC indicate the bricks that will pave the EU-PH calsada together: research and sustainable connectivity for the promotion of quality in legal graduate education in the country. The project addresses the significant concern of the low quality of graduate legal education in the Philippines, which has been shaped by an overemphasis on professional training for the bar exam and a lack of research integration, digitalization, and efficient connectivity in law schools. These challenges have been exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure, limiting online education, research collaboration, and crisis response capacities.

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:

In Portugal, mechanisms aimed at debtors in a difficult economic situation or in imminent insolvency (namely, the special proceedings for revitalization and the special proceedings for a payment agreement) have a marginal use when compared to insolvency proceedings and since 2016 there has been a sharp and steady decline in the number of special proceedings for revitalization issued. Furthermore, the average length of insolvency proceedings largely exceeds 2 years.

The aim of this project is to study the encounter between the Portuguese legal order and the native legal orders in the Portuguese overseas territories in the 18th – 20th centuries. The aim is to find out how these orders were classified, how they were used by colonizers and colonized, how they interacted and were transformed by colonial situations, in various chronologies. Legal pluralism is a central theme in the historiography on empires, but the works dedicated to it in Portuguese historiography have privileged the doctrinal reflections of the colonial elites, and not the action of the local agents of colonial justice and the native populations involved. It is known, however, that the functioning of legal pluralism emerged from the social practices of these people, the administrators and the ‘subjects’ of colonial justice.

In the context of the Rule of Law, legislative power is a tool at the service of the implementation of public policies defined at national level and, in cases such as those of the Portuguese, also at supranational level. In this sense, the way it is exercised and the acts produced in the exercise of this function, it should be subject to scrutiny by citizens, who are simultaneously addressees of the norms produced and addressees of the public policies that justify them. The importance of the accountability of the exercise of legislative power justified the creation of the Observatory of Portuguese Legislation in 2005, with the objective of contributing to the reflection on the quality of legislative policy through the analysis of Portuguese legislative production in quantitative terms (volume, distribution by type of diploma, by legislative body, by subject matter, by type of legislative initiative), a project that is still innovative and pioneering in Portugal today.