Projects

The project addresses the theme of law in medicine oriented to the exercise of the activity of health professionals. The aim is to stimulate the discussion about medical-legal issues and to provide practice-oriented training in order to contribute to a better and efficient exercise of the professional activity of health professionals; trying to avoiding the mass complaints and lawsuits filed against health professionals; to contribute to the improvement of the relationships established between the health professional and the patient. As a rule, health professionals do not have an in-depth knowledge of medical-legal issues and it´s increasing the proliferation of patient complaints and lawsuits, with serious practical consequences for health professionals, medical institutions and patients. On the other hand, this issue has not been sufficiently investigated within the scope of the Law, and there is a notable lack of knowledge among jurists about it. Despite its practical relevance, this is a topic that is not very developed in law schools and is practically unknown among health professionals.

IR: Anabela Gonçalves
Co-IR: Margarida Santos

The CPLP´s African states until the end of the last century criminalized the sexual minorities by virtue of norms that had been in force since colonial times. With a slow change in this scenario started in the 1990s in Guinea-Bissau, there are still states like Angola which are on the way to a legislative reform. In the other countries of the African continent, such as Uganda and Senegal, the existence of so-called State homophobia with high rates of intolerance and discrimination against LGBTI communities is observed. Against this background, the project has two objectives: a) to analyze the relevant legislation of the African countries members of the CPLP, identifying legal and political options that directly or indirectly regulate issues related to gender identity and prohibition of discrimination because of these factors, but also, since these States are signatories to a wide range of legal instruments for the protection of human rights – adopted within the UN or the African Union – to scrutinize respect for these international commitments. On the other hand, b) on a social level, it aims at analyzing the colonial legacy, the influence of religion and popular religiosity, the type of political regime and the actions of international actors in order to build a framework that allows us to identify influences on the State and Legislative options.

IR: Maria de Assunção Vale Pereira
Co-IR: Patrícia Jerónimo

The discovery of “truth” is one of the primary goals of any criminal judicial decision. Nevertheless, the realization of this objective is embedded with difficulties and obstacles concerning the possible role of subjectivity. In fact, “the construction of a solid truth in judicial proceedings is possible only with a knowledge, as deep as possible, of everything that can hinder it, and even make it impossible” (Calheiros, 2015, 75). In this context, the study of the evidence is particularly useful because of the challenge to the selection of the facts, to the reasoning behind it and to the judicial reasoning, according to reasonableness criteria (Calheiros, 2015, p. 81).
In this sense, the aim of this project is to analyze how the judge (and previously the public prosecutor) evaluates the evidence in the light of the current paradigm on freedom of appreciation of the evidence and how it produces the selection of proven and unproven facts and its statement of the facts, in the field of criminal proceedings, when “difficult facts” are involved. These facts “… involve a much more demanding exercise of appreciation and, in the exact same proportion, they are much more susceptible to relativization” (Calheiros, 2015, pp. 77, 78). Indeed, the variety of types of facts whose knowledge will have to be established in judicial proceedings, and on which the legal solution will be adopted depends, constitutes an enormous challenge to the capacity of jurists, requiring them that that they can equip themselves with adequate tools to deal with it (Calheiros, 2015, p.21).
In this sense, the project intends: 1) to analyse the obstacles with which the entrance and the knowledge of the facts are in the judicial processes; 2) to detect the specific difficulties in the task of appreciation of evidence and in the judicial reasoning; 3) to detect and understand the rational mechanisms / logical processes of appreciation of evidence, which allow certain facts to be determined from certain evidence; 4) to expose and understand how dominant social discourses may frame the appreciation of evidences and anchor convictions.

IR: Clara Calheiros
Co-IR: Margarida Santos

The central objective of the project now presented is to seek to characterize and consolidate this sustainability, to understand its multiple manifestations and to draw up a rigorous framework regarding both existing international and European instruments for its implementation, and what has been done in Portugal (both from the legislative and judicial points of view). Once this scenario has been outlined, we will advance, with due dogmatic support, to the attempt to point out ways, and seeking to present a set of proposals for legislative reform, judicial action, public policies and communication, in order to transform sustainability into an effective human right, seen as a new paradigm of community living, in the relation of man to the other and to environment. The various activities proposed therefore seek to correspond to a holistic understanding of this right of sustainability, which is seen as a reality that goes far beyond the law.
In view of this, the team that will carry out this project is naturally constituted by a significant body of Law Academics (in the areas of constitutional law, European law, administrative law, local law, criminal law, etc.), but accompanied by experts from other equally important areas when we talk about sustainability. The necessary holistic vision that we have been referring to can only be manifested in a concatenation between actors from different fields, who can, with their contributions, draw attention to the various aspects that must be taken into account when we want to talk about sustainability as human right. Beyond the team members, mainly (but not exclusively) from academia, the project also has significant partnerships and collaborations, both with academics from foreign universities with recognized work in this area and with civil society institutions that work daily with the reality of sustainable development.
It seems to us, therefore, that the project we propose and intend to carry out will play a key role within the Portuguese social and legal landscape, with clear links both to the European space and, more broadly, to the international space, since it corresponds to an undeniable fact of the world today. In a global society of risks (of various and multifaceted risks), we can not really speak of development unless we consider that each human being, every country, every region, every continent can only advance in articulation with the others. Sustainability thus becomes an innovative understanding of the relationship between human beings and between them and the planet – but which, in the end, is immanent to human nature itself.

IR: Flávia Loureiro
Co-IR: Andreia Sofia Oliveira

This project aims to research the modifications arising out of the introduction of robots in daily life and its impact in law, in the context of organizational modifications and its subsequent need of adaptation of legal rules. This project will start from the computational reality, alongside the most recent technical developments and starting a process of legal reflection on the consequences of the introduction of software and robots with higher and higher degrees of autonomy. The technical concepts will be the starting point. It is intended to import from computational sciences the concepts of “agent” and “object”, “robot” and “mechanism”, and from these looking for considering its adaptation to the legal framework. From this, traditional legal concepts and institutes shall be revisited. It shall be equated the problematics of the will from the consideration of the existence of intentional states in software and robots (Giovanni Sartor). And, from this, it will be questioned and developped the traditional legal institutes of liabilities and torts, both in the civil as in the criminal domains, having in full consideration the characterisitcs of the new electronic entities, mainly autonomy, capacity of learning, pro-activity and sociability. It will still be analyzed the impacts in the organized society, both at the level of public administration, considering the transformation and adaptation of the urban areas to a new connectivity and interactivity (smart cities) and at the level of entrepreneurial organizations, with particular focus in the modifications that will necessarily occur in the domain of labour relationships.
In order to reach the proposed aims, it will be necessary to integrate several diferent domains of knowledge in the project, including the scientific domains of Legal Knowledge and of Computational Sciences, being of particular relevance the domain of Artificial Intelligence. On the legal side, we shall have to convoque the diferent domains of legal knowledge, both from the private law domain (civil law, labour law) and from the public law domain (criminal law, administrative law). The fact that some of the researchers in this project are lecturing the Master Course on Law and Informatics at the University of Minho will certainly be of utmost relevance for reaching the proposed aims. Also the interdisciplinarity of the research team, integrating law specialists and engineers, will be a decisive factor. The proposed work has an obvious relevance considering recent reports of international consulting groups foreseeing profound organizational and labour alterations in the years to come. http://observador.pt/opiniao/se-o-futuro-do-trabalho-pertence-aos-robos-o-que-vao-fazer-os-nossos-filhos/ . It is this challenge, with profound legal implications, particularly in the area of human rights and requiring an inter-disciplinary approach, that we are intending to research.

IR: Francisco Andrade
Co-IR: Teresa Coelho Moreira

General objectives:
– scientific, academic, professional and civic awareness of the importance of criminal sanctions in the process of rehabilitation of convicts and victims;
– contribution to the humanization of the penal system;
– demonstration of the ineffectiveness of inhuman, long and radical penalties;
– training on penology issues;
– dissemination of knowledge on criminal justice and human rights;
Research ideas:
– the meaning and purpose of criminal sanctions, and the development of a “new” criminal paradigm;
– inconsistencies in jurisprudence on penology;
– the (in)effectiveness of the penitentiary system;
– the practical implications of a social nature for the convicted person and his family;
– reparation and reconciliation in criminal justice;
– legal peace and social peace (a more human perspective).
Strategies:
– dissemination of research results using a dedicated website to the Project, the website of the Promoting Center, and electronic publications;
– encouragement of the discussion of this topic in scientific events and in the media;
– implementation of workshops and short training courses;
– holding three annual international conferences with the participation of experts on the subject;
– strong interaction with society, especially with entities related to the topic, both in the study and in the dissemination of results.
Research plan:
– four research plans:
a) theoretical and principiological: a general and transversal study on relevant theory and principles about the meaning and purposes of the criminal sanctions, which will set out the guidelines and main questions for the study to be followed in the subsequent plans;
b) normative and comparative: a critical study of the norms related to the penitentiary system (criminal sanctions, purposes and choice and length or amount of criminal sanctions);
c) practical, jurisprudential and enforcement-related: a comparative study of some paradigmatic judicial decisions, their enforcement and the personal and social implications (of the convicted and family);
d) applied and compared: the results of the investigations will be applied both in Portugal (object-system) and in Portuguese-speaking countries (beneficiary systems), both in the legal system and in the training of professionals.
Complementarity among the participating entities:
– Interaction with entities with forensic tasks and those dealing with the enforcement of criminal sanctions with whom a protocol will be drawn up.
Relevance and innovative character:
The project is relevant because it will demonstrate the relative inefficiency of the penal system and is innovative because it will introduce a reparative purpose in the penal system and in the criminal sanctions? enforcement system. It will also contain a training component, which will be useful for professionals involved in the enforcement of criminal sanctions.

IR: Mário Monte
Co-IR: Pedro Freitas

InclusiveCourts is an interdisciplinary research project which gathers lawyers, anthropologists and sociologists, in a cooperation between the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Human Rights, based in Braga, and the Centre for Research in Anthropology, based in Lisbon. It seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the legal challenges raised by cultural diversity in Europe. It focuses on the practice of the courts because of the important role that domestic courts have been taking on as places of encounter and tension among different cultures and legal traditions, in a growing context of legal pluralism and interlegality. The project aims to map and make an assessment of the way in which courts act in cases involving ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities (what is commonly referred as ‘multicultural jurisprudence’), namely, the way courts use concepts such as race, culture, ethnicity and religion; the way they interpret the principle of equality and balance it with respect for cultural difference; their openness to cultural arguments and evidence and the weight that they accord such arguments/evidence in their rulings.
The multicultural jurisprudence of Portuguese courts is a particularly good case study, given the relative novelty of Portugal’s status as an immigration country and multicultural society and the widespread (if not yet tested) assumption that Portugal is particularly apt for intercultural dialogue and immigrant integration. There are no interdisciplinary studies covering it in a comprehensive and systematic manner and Portugal is usually absent from comparative studies on multicultural jurisprudence. The project includes an inventory and critical assessment of the multicultural jurisprudence of Portuguese courts from 1976 onwards, covering all judicial areas (constitutional, administrative, civil, criminal, labour, family), and the setup of a database of annotated case law. The review of the rulings will be made in light of the theoretical debates on multiculturalism, legal pluralism and human rights, and of international human rights standards, at global and regional level. By comparing the Portuguese judicial practice with existing reports from other domestic jurisdictions in Europe, the project will advance the current state of comparative research on multicultural jurisprudence in Europe.
The project also seeks to respond to a recurring concern in recent years regarding the lack of preparation of judicial actors for engaging in intercultural communication and the need for further information and training. Through the direct involvement of judges, prosecutors and other judicial actors, the project aims to identify best practices and set up guidelines for an inclusive and ‘diversity aware’ judicial practice in Portugal. It will include the design of a training program for judicial actors, to be implemented as a pilot training program at the Centre for Judicial Studies (CEJ) and in different courts.

IR: Patrícia Jerónimo
Co-IR: Manuela Ivone Cunha

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The Human Rights Center (DH-CII) is funded by the FCT.
In this strategic programme the DH-CII: will continue to paying attention to data protection, bioethics, immigration and cultural diversity, and democracy and State-building; will strengthen its interdisciplinary dynamic by engaging researchers of other fields, taking part in research projects involving other research centres; will foster its internationalization by strengthening the existing partnerships and by establishing new ones, by organizing regular international conferences and by supporting the participation of its researchers in international scientific meetings. One strong component of the Centre’s activities will continue to be the research and the supervision of the research projects conducted within the context of some of the Master programs at the Law School of the University of Minho.
More information see here.

The Human Rights Center (DH-CII) was funded by the FCT.
More information see here.

The Human Rights Center (DH-CII) was funded by the FCT.

The main goals of this research unit [Human Rights – Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (HR–CIR)], for the current and the upcoming years (2011-2013), were: to consolidate the work that has been done until now, to strengthen the research in its areas (as described above) and to extend its internationalization.

More information see here.

The Working Group on the Security Council of the United Nations
– HR- Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, Universidade do Minho
– Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

“Propostas para o Mandato Português no Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas”

Professor Doutor Carlos Gaspar
Professor Doutor Pedro Bacelar de Vasconcelos

The DHCII, in cooperation with the Government of Timor-Leste, published the book “Annotated Edition of the Constitution of Timor-Leste”.
This project, required by the Government of Timor-Leste as an important contribution for the State-building process, was sponsored by IPAD (Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento) and involved several researchers with knowledge of and experience in Timor-Leste as well as judges of Timor-Leste courts.
The digital version of the book is available online through the DH-CII website, reaching out to all the interested public.
Check here the book.