Lund University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law have launched a new human rights hub. The Lund Human Rights Research Hub is meant to be a core driver in developing new research, education, and dissemination of human rights to meet the most pressing human rights challenges of today.
The hub will officially be launched on December 8 at 14:00 in the Lund University Main Building. The event is open to all.
Jonas Hafström, chairman of the board of Lund University, and Morten Kjaerum, the director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, will deliver welcome speeches.
“The hub 
will be one of Europe’s largest interdisciplinary human rights research environments and it will put Lund University and Sweden on the map as a key player in the field of human rights,” says Kjaerum.
The hub brings together over 60 researchers from Lund University and reaches across a wide number of disciplines, from the Faculty of Medicine to the Center for East and South-East Asian Studies. The hub serves to showcase the wide range of human rights expertise at Lund University and to stimulate increased collaboration and multi-disciplinary research and education.
At the launch on December 8, Anne Orford, the Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Chair of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, will deliver the keynote address on critical thinking and human rights.
In addition, seven researchers will present five-minute presentations of their research and there will also be a panel discussion and open floor discussion.
The new research hub will enable human rights researchers to strengthen and rethink their work to address today’s major challenges. It will encourage researchers to critically inquire into what these changes in the political landscape mean for the field of human rights studies. It will push researchers to be innovative in terms of how they measure and analyse the world around them. And it will help ensure that the research and knowledge is clearly and broadly disseminated.
The hub is coordinated by a steering group with members of each participating institution and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, which serves as the Secretariat. The participating institutions are the Department of Philosophy, the Department of History, the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Medicine, the Department of Sociology, the School of Social Work, the Sociology of Law Department, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Business Law, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Centre for Environmental and Climate Research (CEC), Work, Technology and Social Changed (WTS), and the Child Rights Institute at Lund University.