In this podcast, RWI research fellows Tahmina Sobat and Mohammad Mustafa Raheal reflect on their year-long fellowship at RWI and share their key takeaways.

This latest episode in our series highlighting Defend-Bio focuses on environmental justice, human rights, and their relationship to biodiversity and climate change. RWI's thematic leader on Human Rights and the Environment Claudia Ituarte-Lima sat down with Anna Maria Vargas, Valentina Lomanto and Juan Antonio Samper to talk about the journey so far in developing the Defend-Bio transnational legal clinic.

Andrea Boggio delivered the annual Fulbright Lecture yesterday on the topic: “Science Has No Homeland: The Duty of International Scientific Cooperation in Human Rights Law”

Today’s episode takes on a special format. We will be sharing with our listeners a recording of the 2025 Anna Lindh Lecture as it was delivered. The Anna Lindh Lecture is an annual public event co-organized by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, the Anna Lindh Memorial Foundation, Lund University and Lund University Association of Foreign Affairs. It commemorates the late Anna Lindh, a Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs who was assassinated in 2003. The 2025 Anna Lindh Lecture was delivered by Hadja Lahbib, European Commissioner for Equality; Preparedness and Crisis Management.

In this episode, our guest is Arpine Matevosyan, a passionate human rights advocate whose work sits at the intersection of law, technology, and social justice. She holds a Master’s in Human Rights and Social Justice from the American University of Armenia, and brings a thoughtful, cross-disciplinary approach to the field.

This episode is part of the Rights-Based Climate Adaptation in Armenia and Georgia initiative, designed to support public sector professionals to advance their contextual understanding of human rights and gender equality dimensions of the climate change-related challenges and associated adaptation initiatives taking place in their countries.

In this episode, Narine Gasparyan, a human rights lawyer, academic, and PhD

researcher, shares insights from her work on the restitution of property rights for victims

of armed conflicts in Europe. Drawing on over two decades of experience in legal

reform, international litigation, and human rights advocacy, Narine explores how the

European Court of Human Rights has addressed land and housing rights in post-conflict

settings.

This episode features Professor Annika Rudman and RWI Senior Researcher Alejandro Fuentes in a discussion on women’s rights, gender inequality, and intersectional vulnerabilities. It is part of RWI’s Regional Africa Programme and connects to our newly published book marking 20 years since the adoption of the Maputo Protocol.

The publication explores what substantive transformative equality means in practice within African continental and regional human rights systems, addressing a wide range of issues including gender-based discrimination, abuse, exploitation, and violence.

In this episode, we are joined by Nazeela Elmi, a human rights scholar specializing in conflict-affected regions, particularly focusing on gender, transitional justice and inclusive peace-building. She has served as a Professional Specialist at the Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton University, where she centred her work around human rights advocacy and policy research. Nazeela’s lived experience as a young Uzbek-Afghan woman deeply informs her scholarship and activism. She is dedicated to promoting inclusive peace and justice programs for Afghanistan’s most marginalized communities.

In this second episode we are joined by Carol Rask and Alvaro Amaya, our partners from the Danish Institute for Human Rights. In the Defend-Bio project, they focus on the work package 6 analyzing the citizen-generated data and legal empowerment, starting from the co-development of legal empowerment tool to capacity building and data collection, data analysis and finally, data-driven policy influencing.