On 17 October 2025 the Human Rights Lunch Online will welcome Jacob Lind from Malmö University. Human Rights Lunch Online is a digital meeting place organized by the Human Rights Profile Area. Bring your lunch and join us on Zoom at 12:15 – 13:00: https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/65437566996.
By Jacob Lind, Malmö University and Lund University
In my five-year ERC project starting January 2026 – The right to give rights. Welfare professionals as guardians of undocumented migrants’ human rights (GIVE RIGHTS) – I will investigate how welfare professionals across Europe view their role in providing undocumented migrants their human rights. The project is inspired by the collective contestations by unions and professional associations who together with large parts of the rest of civil society collectively protested against the Swedish Government’s proposal that welfare professionals of any kind should have a duty to report undocumented migrants. Thanks to these large protests, the government backed down and exempted health care, education, social work and most other sectors from being deputized to perform migration control.
Several decades ago, Hannah Arendt pointed out that universalistic understandings of human rights have little to offer noncitizens. Inspired by her, researchers have suggested that the foundation for undocumented migrants’ human rights instead can be found in the right-claims and contestations of migrants themselves. However, little attention has been paid to the role of welfare professionals in these processes.
Across Europe, throughout the last decades, welfare professionals have resisted proposals that they should have a duty to report undocumented migrants to the police. This has been pivotal for protecting migrants’ rights. Consequently, GIVE RIGHTS hope to develop new conceptual tools for an interdisciplinary understanding of undocumented migrants’ rights as rooted in an interplay between migrants’ rights-claims and welfare professionals’ attitudes, practices, and collective contestations – highlighting the underexamined relational character of rights. The project investigates the politics of undocumented migrants’ rights as an interplay between different actors with converging interests: Undocumented migrants want access to their human rights – in Arendt’s words they want to have a “right to have rights” – and welfare professionals do not want to act as extended border guards but have a “right to GIVE RIGHTS”.
GIVE RIGHTS will compare Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK where the protection of undocumented migrants’ access to rights are, or have recently been, undergoing intense negotiations. The project combines survey data with policy mapping, qualitative media analysis, participant observation, focus groups and expert interviews. Through my approach I hope to understand better what it takes for welfare professionals to collectively mobilize around an issue like undocumented migrants’ human rights across different societal contexts. To what extent are human rights of precariously positioned groups in society important for how welfare professionals choose to position themselves as societal actors collectively? When the human rights paradigm is being questioned on a political level, will welfare professionals stand up collectively as “guardians of human rights” or will they take another position? By answering questions like this, GIVE RIGHTS aims to contribute to theoretical and political debates on the future of human rights in Europe.
Jacob Lind is Project researcher at the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University and the Malmö Institute for Migration Studies (MIM). He is also a visiting researcher at the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University during autumn 2025. Jacob’s PhD examined the paradoxes of undocumented migrant children’s rights, vulnerability, and agency in Sweden and the UK. In spring 2025, Jacob completed a FORTE-funded postdoc at AMIS, Copenhagen University, on undocumented childhoods. Until Feb 2023, Jacob led Sweden’s team in the EU Horizon 2020 project MIMY on migrant youth integration. Between 2025–2028 Jacob leads the Swedish part of Practicing Hope (YouHope), a NordForsk-funded project on youth in super-diverse urban communities.
