Co-funded Projects

FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School is an Associate Partner of the GEM-DIAMOND project (Globalisation, Europe and Multilateralism: Democratic Institutions, the rise of Alternative MOdels and mounting Normative Dissensus) from the Marie Skłodowska Curie Action - Doctoral Network (Call EU HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01, grant n. 101073292). 

This EU-funded project was launched in October 2022 and will assess the EU’s capacity to act given the challenges facing Democratic Institutions, the rise of Alternative MOdels and mounting Normative Dissensus (DIAMOND).

GEM-DIAMOND is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Action - Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) involving 6 European -  i.e. ULB, UvA, LUISS, UCPH, UBB, Paris1 - and 5 international – i.e. UoW, UNIGE, UL, WUT, FGV - degree-awarding Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) alongside 6 well-established non-academic institutions – i.e. CEPS, IAI, GMF, PATRIR, FIDH, EGMONT.

The project will hire and train 16 doctoral fellows to help address knowledge gaps associated with the growing dissensus undermining both multilateral and democratic practice. Its' key expected research outputs include:

• Sixteen original doctoral manuscripts
• One edited volume
• One handbook
• Four Special Issues

GEM-DIAMOND’s overall research program will tackle three shared knowledge gaps regarding contemporary strains on liberal democracy:

Objective 1: Conceptualising the seemingly mounting dissensus surrounding liberal democracy.
Objective 2: Unpacking the ambiguous role different actors can play as both champions and challengers of liberal democratic norms, values, and practices.
Objective 3: Assessing the impact of increased dissensus regarding liberal democracy on the policy instruments of the EU and its capacity to act in its internal and external policies.

FGV will participate in the co-direction of the PhD thesis of GEM-DIAMOND DOCTORAL Fellow Benedetta Arrighini and will issue a joint PhD degree with Université Libre de Bruxelles and LUISS University of Rome. Benedetta’s research title is “Breaking or branching with Brazil? The legal contestation of the rule of law and EU’s cooperation in criminal matters with Mercosur. A case-study”. The research is supervised by Professors Anne Weyembergh (ULB), Paula Wojcikiewicz Almeida (FGV) and Rossella Sabia (LUISS University).

Research abstract
The research is a legal contestation, meaning a discussion based on legal roots on the rule of law impact in a very specific issue: the judicial cooperation in criminal matters within EU and MERCOSUR countries. In few words: will the EU take into consideration the rule of law once concluded the MERCOSUR agreement dealing with judicial cooperation?

The study will involve several aspects of the EU framework. First, the role of the EU as a global actor from a legal perspective: the EU external action is governed by the Treaties of the EU and the inquiry will focus on art. 3(5) TEU and article 21.2 (a) affirming the importance of the EU in the international scene, but at the same time the necessity to preserve, and on a certain sense, export its values. As a consequence, the conclusion of international agreements requires the respect of the EU principles, all included in the concept of rule of law. Among the subjects related to an international agreement, there is the judicial cooperation. The EU has a developing Area of Freedom Security and Justice, and its instruments have been expanded outside the EU borders through International Agreements, but also the international community. However, as already said, there is the need to evaluate the respect of the EU values.

The study will focus not on judicial cooperation as a whole, but on the cooperation in criminal matters, in which the risk to breach fundamental rights is high due to the relations within the State as warrant of order and respect of human rights of the victims, but also of the defendants.

The interaction within the EU external action and the judicial cooperation in criminal matters will be analysed using a practical example, meaning the interaction within the EU and Mercosur countries. Indeed, they have been concluding an International Agreement for years, with the peculiarity that the EU and Mercosur are two regional organization, and this contributes to add much more complexity in finding common points of view.

The cooperation in criminal matters is not a defined subject yet and from this the reason and the purpose of the research. It will map the current situation regarding cooperation in criminal matters looking at the international, European and national level, focusing on one country from the South Market, Brazil; Moreover, the study will a practical instrument, emblematic for the cooperation in criminal matters, meaning the extradition, this will be an opportunity to deep understand the interface, but also the possible difficulties in the respect of the rights of the defendants.

The last part will aim at evaluating the role of the EU as a global actor in criminal cooperation in criminal matters, a delicate issue that has been left behind without looking at the positive outcomes it can provide.

The FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School has an Inter-institutional agreement with the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg under the Erasmus+ Programme (Key Action 1: Learning mobility for higher education students and staff), for the Call Years 2021-2027. Erasmus+ is the EU's programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe, with funding from the European Commission. As part of this agreement, students from FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School have the opportunity to qualify and participate in the European Private Law Summer School. This agreement was made possible due to the participation of Professor Paula Almeida as a faculty member in the Summer School.

Programme

Understanding different legal systems and their underlying principles in private law has become of the highest importance for lawyers wanting to play an important part in the globalised world of today. The Academy for European Private Law offers, in collaboration with the University of Salzburg and leading universities around the world, a programme aimed at helping achieve this goal.

The programme is organised as a Summer School, in which students are familiarised with the essentials of more than 30 different legal systems during two weeks. More than 40 professors as well as several Justices from Supreme Courts and/or the ECJ attend. They come from nearly all the European Union member states, but also well beyond that (Canada, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, among others) to introduce students to their respective legal systems and to discuss the main features of those legal systems. Issues which matter to comparative and international lawyers (such as law and language, mixed legal systems, legal transplants, methodology in comparative law, European harmonisation of private law or how to read the decisions of various supreme courts) are also discussed and further developed during the daily round tables, where a group of professors present their ideas and debate with the participants. Participants have the possibility to get a more practical view of the differences between legal systems during the workshops, where case studies are discussed in order to show how the same facts may or may not lead to different results in various legal systems. Lectures are mainly taught in English, but some are taught in parallel sessions (English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian). The workshops are organised in parallel sessions (English, German and French).

Venue
The Summer School takes place at the law faculty in Salzburg, Austria – a picturesque city surrounded by the Alps, well-known for its musical heritage and stunning architecture. The law faculty is located in the heart of the historic part of the city, in the so-called Toskanatrakt, a 12th century building and a former residence of the archbishop.

This research project is developed under a partnership between the FGV Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence and the Jean Monnet Chair of the European Union at the Universidad de Concepción. The product of the research under development, 'The reflections of populism in Brazilian foreign policy: the challenges between rhetoric and legal practice', will result in an article to be presented in the forthcoming book: "Impacto, riesgos e oportunidades del populismo en Europa y América Latina" (Editorial Tirant lo Blanch). Editors of the book: Dr. Paulina Astroza; Dr. Beatriz Larraín; Dr. Cristóbal Bellolio; Dr. Leslie Wehner. 

To mark the beginning of a new level of partnership, FGV, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and Queen Mary University of London met on 29, 30 and 31 August at FGV headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, to define and launch a new strategic fund for the development of multidisciplinary research, the Brazil Accelerator Fund (BAF).
The project was submitted and accepted in 2023, qualifying for funding under the Brazil Accelerator Fund, within the topic of 'Decoding the Influence of WHO Standards in Brazil: A Multidisciplinary Approach'.
Project Summary
Successive health crises raised questions on the capacity to provide responses and adopt urgent measures at the global and domestic levels. Within the international coordination in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) played a key role by the creation of technical recommendations in collaboration with local governments. As the WHO consistently exercises its normative authority, more attention is given to the organization’s normative technique and the apparent blurring distinction between soft and hard law commitments. In developing countries, the relevance of WHO law‐making function is notable. 
Considering the World Health Organization’s normative production to be its most prominent function, this project aims to apply statistical models constructed to describe the chains of influence between an international organization’s normative instruments and the activity of different branches of a national legal system (knowledge gap). Such an innovative approach is envisioned by using cyclic direct graphical models to represent the various conditional probabilities, which encode the influence among distinct legal agents, and by allowing to establish a likelihood function that can predict the distribution of an IO’s influenced documents produced by each national agent.

Although unusual in the legal field, these mathematical models have been widely recognized in computational biology, public health care providing, and image processing, which ultimately led to the development of many distinct techniques for both inference and learning. Adjustments to the default graphical models can be made for a legal study, such as incorporating temporal dimensions and other concepts from natural language processing to precisely define the general idea of textual influence. 

The suggested approach benefits not only from a mathematics-law interaction, but also from inputs of fields of research in which these techniques are often applied. The database to be produced will be available via the FGV’s Dataverse platform, providing for public access and use by other researchers and the general public. In collaboration with Queen Maryand Fiocruz, this innovative research project in the field of law, health and mathematics aims to evaluate the impact of WHO norms on domestic legal systems and to foster the development of multidisciplinary-empirical approaches in legal research.

This research project aims to: (1) evaluate the impact of WHO norms in Brazil’s legal system, (2) foster the development of multidisciplinary-empirical approaches in legal research and (3) create a sustainable transatlantic network of experts in the area.

A detailed work plan was developed to ensure the project’s feasibility. The following steps are foreseen in the project’s implementation plan: 

• Qualitative research plan: undertaking literature survey on influence and impact in international law; defining the themes, sub-themes and time periods for the production of graphics; 
• Quantitative research plan: carrying out a survey of WHO references in the Brazilian Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches; conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data; developing natural language processing models for the classification of normative texts; obtaining data with the key words of each of the Brazil’s Federal branches; extracting material for qualitative analysis; 
• Products planned: consolidating the results in the qualitative analysis on the data basis; writing an article on the research preliminary results and comparing the results of the model and the differentiation between binding and non-binding norms; planning and organizing a seminar to present partial results.

The FGV Applied Research Network [RPCAP (PPA) – Edital 001/2021] funds the project.

Project Summary
The project aims to answer a substantive and a methodological research question. First, it seeks to analyze the references to World Health Organization (WHO) standards in the practice of Brazilian federal institutions with regard to regulatory management of Health, with the expectation that it may contribute to the evaluation of the influence of international instruments on existing public health policies in Brazil. Second, it seeks to develop a specific research methodology capable of being reproduced to evaluate the application of international instruments in national practice more broadly.

It is dedicated to identifying the forms and strategies of incorporation of the norms and standards of the World Health Organization into Brazilian law, especially in the federal sphere (Executive, Legislative and Judiciary), combining both quantitative and qualitative research approaches. To this end, the need to develop a specific methodology of analysis with the application of data science knowledge was noted.

For data collection and identification of mentions, automated search methodology and natural language processing was used, especially through the Python programming language. This allows the collection and analysis of large volumes of textual data without the need for investment in intensive manual labour.

From an empirical point of view, the study on the WHO impact measure on the national legal system is divided into two parts. Firstly, as the measure of "impact" can be subjective depending on its context, an analysis of all documents is required. Secondly, identification of how they are implemented in practice will be conducted, i.e. which of the powers, bodies and/or agencies are first influenced and then "spread" the influence over the rest of the national legal system.

This project is funded and developed under the Graduate Stricto Sensu Programme of the FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School.

Project Summary
In recent decades, the participation of state and non-state actors in the international law-making process has become one of the basic features of international law. Recent changes also include the participation of new actors and a more influential role of judicial bodies linked to IGOs. As multifunctional actors, international courts and tribunals (ICTs) perform important functions, such as the development of normative expectations. Therefore, the role of ICTs encompasses the protection and development of the international community and its values.

The jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) also deals with issues involving community interests or individual rights, cases concerning diplomatic protection being a prominent example. Indeed, States may "litigate the international rights of their citizens or of citizens of other States". Notably, human rights cases are not only being litigated in courts established specifically for this purpose. The ICJ has dealt with genocide, war crimes and other human rights violations.

Environmental law cases are also among the issues that reflect widespread concern or broad public interest. Even border disputes can have an important impact on individuals. These examples illustrate the growing trend that international litigation has rarely been a matter of private concern or interest that exclusively affects the disputing parties and indirectly stimulates public interest in the Court's work, among other advantages.

By applying empirical research methodology to map the practice of the ICJ with regard to State and NSA notifications and other forms of submitting relevant information to the Court under the ICJ Statute and Rules, this research addresses the potential and limits of State and NSA participation in both contentious cases and advisory proceedings. It goes beyond describing and exemplifying formal avenues of participation and presents a well-rounded picture of the ICJ's contentious and advisory practice. It also addresses other informal avenues of participation of state and non-state actors and their challenges.

The Getulio Vargas Foundation's Law School in Rio de Janeiro (FGV Direito Rio), through its Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, promoted on 16 March 2023 the workshop "Transforming the Role of International Courts and Tribunals in a New Era of Adjudication", held at the FGV headquarters, in Botafogo, from 9am to 6pm, with the support of the European Union's Erasmus+ Programme. The debates were entirely conducted in English.

Organised by Paula Wojcikiewicz Almeida, coordinator of FGV's Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, the event aimed to shed light on international courts and tribunals that are increasingly faced with politically sensitive issues, both in the international and domestic spheres. Recent cases before the International Court of Justice include Gambia v. Myanmar and Ukraine v. Russia. According to the professor, these examples illustrate the growing trend that international litigation is rarely the exclusive concern or interest of the disputing parties. Consequently, demands for greater legitimacy and transparency have been gaining strength in recent years before International Courts and Tribunals, and it is up to them to find the balance between the rights of the parties and the interests of the international community.

The workshop, counted with the participation of renowned international speakers. The opening speech was led by Laurence Boisson de Chazournes (University of Geneva). Panel I, "International Courts and Tribunals: Current Challenges", was chaired by Professor Paula Almeida and included the participation of Diego P. Fernández Arroyo (Sciences Po Law School), Jean-Marc Sorel (Sorbonne Law School, University of Paris 1), Serena Forlati (University of Ferrara) and Miriam Cohen (University of Montreal).

Panel II, "Working with Large Databases on International Courts", was chaired by Ely Caetano Xavier Junior (Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro), and included presentations on research projects that combine empirical legal methods with the study of International Courts and Tribunals, previously submitted through a Call for Papers open to the public. The first presentation was directed by Seán Fobbe (Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich), with comments from FGV's professors and researchers: Raphael Tinarrage (FGV EMAp), José Luiz Nunes (FGV Direito Rio), Lucas Thevenard Gomes (FGV Direito Rio) and Henrique Ennes (FGV EMAp). The closing words of the event, on "The Mixed Methods Turn in Studying Courts", were directed by Malcolm Langford (University of Oslo).

The Workshop was funded by the Coordination of Superior Level Staff Improvement (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, CAPES) under the Programme to Support Events in the Country (Programa de Apoio a Eventos no País, PAEP - Edital Nº 6/2022).

This project has been granted funding through the "Project Proposals for External Funding for FGV - Continuous Flow Call" launched by the FGV Applied Research Network (RPCAP). Its primary objective was to develop a comprehensive Project Proposal with the aim of securing funding from the Erasmus+ Programme for the establishment of a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for the period 2023-2026. 

The project aims to increase knowledge about the practice of normative production in different regulatory contexts, to stimulate interest in developing research on normative production of regulatory bodies at international and European levels, the challenges of normative implementation and enforcement, with the intention of accessing the role of governance reforms as a response to the challenges raised by the expansion of normative powers in international and European legal orders. The project will consist of two research lines: global regulation and global litigation.

One of the objectives of the project is to promote dialogue between the academic world and society, including policy-makers, civil servants, civil society actors. 

In order to generate socio-economic impact, the project "The challenges of international regulation in the context of global governance: limits and possibilities of the EU method" will offer various activities both for the academic public and to disseminate knowledge and insights that support the formulation of public policies in Brazil.

It is noteworthy that the participation of partner institutions from South America and Europe will ensure greater visibility of the academic activities developed by the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. The impact, visibility and dissemination of the project will be widely promoted with the publication of research and marketing material and the intensive use of social media and its institutional website.

Partnerships with other institutions represent a central element for the implementation of the project, since their professionals bring a multidisciplinary, international and comparative vision. Once approved by the funder, the composition of the project team will include the participation of national and international educational institutions. Among the national ones, we intend to include the collaboration of the School of International Relations (FGV-RI) of São Paulo.

The project aims to increase knowledge about the practice of normative production in different regulatory contexts, to stimulate interest in developing research on normative production of regulatory bodies at international and European levels, the challenges of normative implementation and enforcement, with the intention of accessing the role of governance reforms as a response to the challenges raised by the expansion of normative powers in international and European legal orders. The project will consist of two research lines: global regulation and global litigation. 

One of the objectives of the project is to promote dialogue between the academic world and society, including policy-makers, civil servants, civil society actors.  

In order to generate socio-economic impact, the project "The challenges of international regulation in the context of global governance: limits and possibilities of the EU method" will offer various activities both for the academic public and to disseminate knowledge and insights that support the formulation of public policies in Brazil. 

It is noteworthy that the participation of partner institutions from South America and Europe will ensure greater visibility of the academic activities developed by the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. The impact, visibility and dissemination of the project will be widely promoted with the publication of research and marketing material and the intensive use of social media and its institutional website. 

Partnerships with other institutions represent a central element for the implementation of the project, since their professionals bring a multidisciplinary, international and comparative vision. Once approved by the funder, the composition of the project team will include the participation of national and international educational institutions. Among the national ones, we intend to include the collaboration of the School of International Relations (FGV-RI) of São Paulo. 

This project investigates the challenges of implementing European Union Regulation No. 2023/1115 (EUDR), which combats deforestation by prohibiting the entry of certain products associated with environmental degradation into the European market. The study aims to understand the challenges and opportunities presented by this regulation for both Brazil and the EU. By analyzing relevant legal frameworks at international, regional, and national levels, the project seeks to provide insights into how to ensure compliance with the EUDR and address the underlying causes of deforestation. The findings will be made publicly available to inform policymakers, civil society, and other stakeholders involved in combating deforestation and promoting sustainable practices.

The project's primary objectives include identifying the challenges and opportunities for implementing the EUDR in Brazil, developing recommendations for public and private actors, and contributing to the broader understanding of international forest governance. By focusing on Brazil, a country with significant forest resources and a major role in the global commodities market, this research offers valuable insights into the effectiveness and implications of the EUDR for both the EU and producing countries.