Disputationer 2026
Sofia Åkerman
Personligt ansvar i en patientsäkerhetskultur:
Avvägningar i rätten, rättslig förutsebarhet och drabbades behov.
Datum för disputationen: 27 februari
Fakultetsopponent: docent Kavot Zillén, Stockholms universitet
Ämne: Offentlig rätt
Abstract
This thesis clarifies and highlights how selected parts of Swedish law in the field of health care relate to different ways of understanding events that have caused or could have caused patient injury: a systems perspective and an individual perspective, respectively. It thus examines how the law and its application relate to conflicts between supporting openness and learning based on a systems perspective, and professional accountability based on an individual perspective. The approach expressed by the law and its application is evaluated on the basis of legal predictability as a principle of the rule of law. In addition, the thesis highlights what the law’s approach to these perspectives, and the considerations made, imply for the ability to meet the needs of persons affected by adverse events in healthcare.The study was conducted using a deconstructive and revealing legal dogmatic method, as well as through an empirical study of healthcare providers' reports of incidents that caused or could have caused serious patient injury, and the Swedish Health and Social Care Inspectorate's handling of these cases.
The thesis concludes that Swedish law gives the impression of wanting to achieve a “just culture” a culture in which boundaries are drawn between errors that are acceptable and those that are not. However, the answers provided by the law on how these boundaries should be drawn are characterised by considerable uncertainty. This lack of clarity stems from the fact that the provisions leave considerable room for subjective interpretation, but also from the fact that the legal answers in some cases send directly contradictory signals. The empirical study shows that healthcare providers have generally embraced the prospective preventive main purpose of investigating more serious incidents. At the same time, healthcare providers may apply different considerations depending on whether they adopt a systems or an individual perspective in their investigations, and it is not clear when or why one perspective is favoured over the other.
The ambition to promote high patient safety based on a systems perspective has led to a gradual and significant limitation of access to justice for patients and their relatives. Patients and relatives affected by adverse events are today largely dependent on the goodwill and capacity of healthcare providers to meet their needs. In particular, the possibility for patients and relatives to hold individuals personally accountable – and thereby obtain a sense of redress – has been limited.
Läs mer om Sofia Åkermans avhandling i universitetets forskningsportal
Serde Atalay
Access to Housing for Migrants and Refugees: Testing the Boundaries of International
Law
Datum för disputation: 23 april
Fakultetsopponent: professor Colm O’Cinneide, University College London
Ämne: Mänskliga rättigheter
Abstrakt
This thesis examines whether international law is sufficiently equipped for a sound conceptualization of migrants’ and refugees’ right to access housing beyond a minimalistic paradigm. Itaims to assess the potential and shortcomings of this right in counteracting the manner in which power is exercised in migration law, policy, and politics to instrumentalize housing against migrants and refugees. Of particular importance to the examination are migrants and refugees who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, given their increased vulnerability to housing exclusion and precarity. The investigation is crucial and urgent because, in reverse proportion to the key role played by housing in migrants’ and refugees’ life trajectories and inclusion, legal research into their right to access housing has been scant. The thesis focuses on three provisions in international law which are the primary sources of migrants’ and refugees’ right to access housing and state obligations deriving therefrom: article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), article 21 of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (‘the Refugee Convention’), and article 43 of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICRMW), taken alone and together with the non-discrimination provisions of each treaty (article 2(2), ICESCR; article 3, Refugee Convention; article 7, ICRMW). The ambition of this thesis is to show that interpretations of the right to access housing that prioritize the interests of migrants and refugees over states’ sovereign anxieties are possible in international law. To do so, the thesis works with the indeterminacy of rights. The argument is developed in five substantive chapters. Chapter 2 lays bare the ideological and distributive stakes inherent to any interpretation of the right to access housing and empirically grounds the key point that issues faced by migrants and refugees in access to housing and the discriminatory exclusion that they suffer from have a structural nature. Based on this premise, chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on interpreting article 11(1) of the ICESCR, article 21 of the Refugee Convention, and article 43 of the ICRMW, respectively. Chapter 6 answers the question of whether article 2(2) of the ICESCR, article 3 of the Refugee Convention, and article 7 of the ICRMW can accommodate an intersectional lens to understanding and addressing the discrimination faced by migrants and refugees in access to housing. The chief finding of the thesis is that the promise of substantive conceptions of migrants’ and refugees’ right to access housing sits side by side with a systemic self-constraint either embedded in the investigated treaties or exercised by the bodies tasked with interpreting them. Embedded limitations are a feature of the Refugee Convention and the ICRMW whose nature of rightsprotection are so carefully tailored as to escape progressive articulations. Institutionally imposed limitations are observed within the ICESCR system despite the rich interpretative possibilities that the ICESCR offers. The thesis develops arguments to subvert those limitations and shows that international law is yet to fulfil its promise of a life lived in peace and dignity ina safe home for migrants and refugees.
Läs mer om Serde Atalays avhandling i universitetets forskningsportal