Women's Rights/ Children's Rights/ Trafficking in Human Beings

The three heterogeneous human rights topics have specific approaches, but are also marked with similarities.

First, it is an issue of rights of certain social groups (women, children), by strengthening and emancipating them and the need for mainstreaming their rights. In women's rights the gender dimension is an essential element. In the field of children's rights, the generation and age dimension are of great significance. Women’s and children’s right play a conducive role in the development of human rights between private entities (obligation to protect).

Human trafficking provides close ties with both protection of women’s rights as well as of children’s rights. Human trafficking means transportation of persons within a country or across borders by means of for example use of force or of deception for the purpose of exploitation.

Human trafficking has attained much attention on the international and European level, however, with modest success. The challenge is to reach a balance between the well developed law enforcement and the cooperation for protection of victim and prevention of trafficking and to provide monitoring mechanisms based on human rights in all these areas.

Concerning all three research areas the team identifies questions concerning “protection from violence and exploitation”, “access to justice” and “monitoring” as essential part of the research programme. With regard to methodology, a participatory research methodology with persons affected by human rights violations is applied.