Anna Austin has worked at the Council of Europe for 30 years, first as a lawyer at the European Commission of Human Rights and later at the European Court of Human Rights. Ms Austin served as Deputy Jurisconsult from 2015 to 2020 when she was appointed Jurisconsult of the Court. As Jurisconsult, she worked to develop and launch in 2022 the Knowledge Sharing platform, which has revolutionised access to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and Council of Europe standards.
The ECHR Knowledge Sharing platform provides access to comprehensive and up-to-date information on the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. This information is supplemented by references to the relevant international and Council of Europe standards as well as academic publications. The Knowledge Sharing platform is a very useful tool for scholars and students doing research on European human rights law.
Among the other tasks of the directorate of the Jurisconsult are providing information on the case-law to members of the Court as well as external audiences, conducting research on ECHR case-law and on international and comparative law, facilitating dialogue with national courts and exchanges with the Council of Europe bodies and academic institutions.
Are you interested in human rights? JUR-3615 European Human Rights is an elective subject at master degree level at UiT Faculty of Law. Other relevant elective subjects are JUR-3617 Barns menneskerettigheter (in Norwegian), JUR-3620 International law and armed conflict, and JUR-3626 International Criminal Law, Atrocity Crimes, and Transitional Justice.
An international collaboration between children's rights researchers has resulted in a newly published anthology on children's vulnerability viewed in a legal context. Leader of the research group for Child Law Professor Trude Haugli and Associate Professor Mona Martnes from the Faculty of Law at UiT have led the book project as editors.
The anthology has an overarching scientific focus on the concept of vulnerability as understood from a Northwestern European perspective. There has already been done some research on vulnerability in relation to childhood and children's rights, but the contributors to the book identified a gap in the research on vulnerability within a legal context. In this book, they explore more deeply what vulnerability entails, from primarily legal perspectives.
Trude and Mona have answered some questions about the book and the collaborative and editorial work that was done prior to the book’s launch.
Why did you choose to focus on the concept of vulnerability within children's rights perspectives?
Vulnerability is a very exciting concept that is often taken for granted. Vulnerability is used in various ways, and sometimes to mask other arguments or contribute to stigmatisation. At the same time, vulnerability is an important justification for special rights for certain groups, such as children. It is therefore important to analyse the concept in a children's rights context.
The book is a product of a conference organised by the Children's Rights Research Group in 2022. Can you elaborate on how the book as a collaborative project took shape, from idea to execution?
The Children's Rights Group at the Faculty of Law (UiT) was awarded significant funding in 2020 from the Research Council of Norway for a four-year project on children's right to attain the highest standard of health, which is usually referred to as children's right to health. The overarching goal of the project was to contribute to improving and securing children's rights in health matters, by balancing children's right to participation and the right to protection, and balancing parents' rights and duties and children's rights against the state's responsibilities. Nationally, children's rights have largely been understood and approached from a practical basis, which there has been a great need for. However, we believed that it was time to try to develop a theoretical model for understanding children's right to health within a Nordic welfare state perspective.
After identifying some theories that we found relevant, we decided to work with vulnerability theories, based on Martha Fineman's understanding of this phenomenon. The new approach we took was to try to link the theory to an understanding of children's rights. We invited key children's rights researchers to the conference titled "Rethinking Vulnerability from a Children’s Rights Perspective".
Even before the conference, we had received drafts from the participants, and we had presented the idea to the publishing house Universitetsforlaget and received a preliminary green light from them to go ahead with the book.
The texts turned out to fit well together, and after many rounds of reading each other's texts, anonymous peer reviews, improvements based on feedback, and so on, the final version of the book was ready. The editorial work naturally involved reading texts, keeping track of progress, coordinating processes, and not least, having a consistent red thread through the introduction and the concluding chapter.
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What do you hope the book will contribute to?
Further discussions on the use of the concept of vulnerability in children's rights. Perhaps it can also inspire looking at other fundamental premises for legal discussions within this area of law, so that we can continue to develop children's rights.
Through the book process, we have also become even more acquainted with prominent children's rights researchers and have strengthened our international network. By writing the book in English, we have the opportunity to reach out to international research communities, participate in debates internationally, and thereby make our research group even more visible.
The main purpose of the research group is to strengthen research cooperation in children's rights and to create a good environment for the development of research projects. In addition, the aim is to strengthen the participants' own research competence. The research group has organized several international events, most recently a spring 2018 workshop on Children's Constitutional Rights in the Nordic Countries. The project resulted in an edited volume, the book can be read here!
The research group for Child Law has played a major role in the development of specialization and disciplinary strength of this research area, both nationally and in a Nordic context. A newly started research project within the group (2019) is ‘Children’s Right to Health’, financed by the RCN, within a cost frame of NOK 16 million. At its core, the project concerns the development of child rights theory and includes a new dimension on child law through the combination of health law and child law, which is challenging because the two legal domains are built upon two different paradigms.
The research group's members work on a variety of topics in the field of children's law. Included are: topics regarding the relationship between children and parents, child welfare law (especially issues of cohabitation and adoption), procedural questions (especially about mediation in family conflicts), coercive measures, health law issues concerning children and children's human rights, and the principle of the best interests of the child for foreign children in matters of stay on humanitarian grounds and on deportation.
The research also includes ongoing cases before the European Court of Human Rights on Norwegian child welfare.
The members of the group participate in International, Nordic and national research-networks.
Students writing master's thesis on children's rights are welcome to contact the group.
We refer to our Norwegian-language websites for a list of publications associated with the research group