Research profile

Anna Bruce is a legal scholar specialising in international human rights law, with particular expertise in equality, disability rights, gender, migration and the national implementation of international conventions. Her work combines conceptual and normative analysis with interdisciplinary perspectives and sustained engagement in institutional practice and policy development.

Bridging legal theory and implementation research, she examines both the normative foundations and evolution of human rights law and how rights function within domestic governance systems. Across research, teaching and outreach, she is committed to strengthening the conceptual clarity and institutional conditions necessary for international human rights—particularly the rights of persons with disabilities—to be realised effectively, coherently and equally for all.

Research

The overarching concern of Anna Bruce’s research is conceptual and normative: how law understands, structures and responds to human diversity. Her work interrogates the relationship between legal categories and lived realities, asking how international human rights law constructs subjects, distributes entitlements and negotiates difference. Disability has been her primary analytical entry point, but her scholarship increasingly encompasses citizenship, child status, gender and migration status as intersecting axes of legal recognition and exclusion.

At its core, her research examines the tension between the generality of law—its aspiration to universality, abstraction and neutrality—and the particularity of human experience. She analyses how legal systems manage this tension and explores whether, and under what conditions, international human rights law can function as a vehicle for diversity-sensitive social justice rather than as a framework that reproduces structural hierarchies.

A defining feature of her work is sustained interdisciplinary engagement. Drawing on disability studies, gender studies, childhood studies, migration studies, intersectionality theory and post-colonial theory, she evaluates the normative assumptions embedded in legal doctrine. These perspectives are methodological rather than supplementary: they uncover how legal norms encode particular understandings of humanity, autonomy, dependency, vulnerability, capacity and citizenship. Her research thus moves between doctrinal analysis and critical theory in order to examine law both as a system of rules and as a cultural and political project.

Alongside this theoretical orientation, Bruce has developed a substantial body of research on the national implementation of international human rights law. She investigates how treaty obligations are translated into domestic legislation, institutional frameworks and administrative practice, and how institutional design, governance structures and professional cultures shape the realisation of rights. In addition to an ambition to contribute to more effective implementation of international human rights law, this implementation-focused research strengthens and informs her theoretical work by examining how the promises of international law are mediated—and sometimes constrained—by domestic legal culture and administrative rationalities. Her work here focuses in particular on the conceptualisation and implementation of Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA).

Disability Rights, Normative Choice and the CRPD

Bruce’s doctoral thesis, Which Entitlements and for Whom? The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Ideological Antecedents (Lund University, 2014), provides a conceptual analysis of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as a site of normative choice. Drawing on her participation in the Convention’s negotiations, she analysed how competing models of disability and inherited structures of international human rights law shaped the final instrument.

A central theoretical contribution of this work is the identification of the CRPD as the product of cross-roads rather than inevitabilities. The Convention embodies choices about who counts as a rights-holder, which forms of disadvantage are legally cognisable, and how autonomy, dignity and equality are to be conceptualised. In particular, Bruce has analysed the double-edged consequences of the prominence of the Social Model of Disability. While this model reorients law towards structural barriers, participation and recognition, it also generates tensions in relation to positive social rights—most notably the right to health. Her work demonstrates how the Social Model’s scepticism toward medicalisation may inadvertently constrain the articulation of enforceable entitlements to health measures, particularly for persons with extensive support needs, children and persons in the Global South.

This line of inquiry has developed into a broader examination of how different UN human rights conventions conceptualise the right to health, and whether the divergences between them can be normatively consolidated or instead reflect deeper ideological fault lines within international law.

Her subsequent research on Article 33 of the CRPD extends this analysis from normative architecture to institutional realisation. By examining the design and functioning of national implementation and monitoring frameworks—including collaboration with the Swedish Institute for Human Rights—she has analysed how independence, mandate breadth, coordination and accountability structures shape the transformative potential of the Convention. This work highlights how fragmentation of responsibility, limited follow-up mechanisms and insufficient integration of human rights into mainstream governance can weaken the practical force of treaty obligations.

Equality, Intersectionality and the Architecture of Rights

Another key strand of Bruce’s research concerns the conceptual evolution of equality and non-discrimination in international human rights law. She traces the movement from formal equality towards more substantive and transformative models that recognise structural disadvantage and the need for proactive measures. Her work interrogates the theoretical foundations of equality: whether it is best understood as symmetry, redistribution, recognition, or structural transformation.

Intersectionality plays a central role in this analysis. Bruce examines how disability, gender, age and migration status intersect within legal frameworks that tend to treat grounds of discrimination as discrete and additive. She explores the implications of recognising intersecting identities not merely as overlapping categories but as constitutive of distinct forms of exposure to rights violations. This requires bridging doctrinal divides between different treaties and areas of law, and raises fundamental questions about the coherence and fragmentation of international human rights regimes.

Implemenation and Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA)

Her implementation research adds a further dimension to this inquiry. Through national reporting within the framework of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRANET) and commissioned studies on access to justice, political participation, violence against women, disability rights and social rights in the green transition, she has examined how equality norms are operationalised in Swedish law and practice. These studies combine doctrinal analysis, interview-based research and policy review. They reveal how institutional cultures, professional norms and administrative routines interact with legal standards, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes diluting transformative equality ambitions.  A particular focus here is on the conceptualisation, communication and implementation of Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA).

A recurring focus is the gap between formal commitments and lived realities. Bruce analyses attitudinal barriers—such as paternalistic understandings of disability, resistance to rights-based framings within welfare governance, or limited recognition of structural discrimination—as co-constitutive factors in implementation outcomes. In this way, equality is studied not only as a doctrinal principle but as an institutional practice shaped by power, knowledge and organisational design.

Human Rights Law and Refugee Law: Conflicting Logics

In her work on migration, Bruce advances a conceptual comparison between human rights law and refugee law as systems governed by partially incompatible logics. Refugee law operates within a framework that accepts the structural disadvantage of non-citizens as a given and manages it through protection thresholds. By contrast, the CRPD embodies a structural logic that demands the transformation of institutions so that they do not disadvantage their users.

Her research evaluates established procedural systems—such as Refugee Status Determination (RSD)—through the lens of the CRPD’s inclusive standards. The analysis focuses on procedural accommodations, particularly for asylum seekers with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities, and explores whether international law, applied in good faith, requires states to integrate obligations arising under disability law, children’s rights law and refugee law rather than maintaining rigid doctrinal silos.

This work contributes to a broader theoretical question: whether international human rights law is gradually expanding its protective reach in ways that challenge the more static architecture of refugee law, and what this reveals about law’s capacity to respond to shifting understandings of vulnerability and equality. At the same time, her engagement with national asylum procedures and legislative reforms grounds this theoretical inquiry in concrete institutional settings, illuminating how conflicting legal logics are negotiated in practice.

Law as Catalyst, Constraint and Institution

Across these fields, Bruce conceptualises law as simultaneously enabling and limiting social transformation. Legal norms can catalyse change by reshaping institutional practices and redistributing power, but they can also stabilise existing hierarchies through abstraction, fragmentation and bureaucratic routinisation. Her research therefore analyses moments of legal transition—such as the adoption of the CRPD or the restructuring of national asylum systems—as sites where law functions both as a brake and as an engine of normative development.

By combining conceptual analysis with sustained research on implementation, institutional design and governance practices, Bruce advances an integrated understanding of international human rights law: as a normative project shaped by ideological choices, and as a set of institutional arrangements that condition how rights are realised in everyday life. This dual perspective—conceptually rigorous and institutionally grounded—defines the overarching contribution of her scholarship.

Anna Bruce has extensive teaching experience at undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels at Lund University, including the Faculty of Law, the Department of Human Rights Studies and the Department of Gender Studies, as well as nationally and internationally.

Her teaching areas include:

• International human rights law
• Disability rights and the CRPD
• Equality and non-discrimination law and theory
• Violence against women and access to justice
• The evolution of international human rights law
• Treaty interpretation and legal research methodology

She has served as course coordinator, thesis supervisor and assistant supervisor to doctoral candidates. Her pedagogical approach is research-led and analytically rigorous, while remaining closely connected to legal and institutional practice. Drawing on experience in legislative processes, policy advisory work and international negotiations, she integrates treaty body jurisprudence, case studies and national implementation challenges into her teaching.

Bruce has also contributed to the development of Clinical Legal Education (CLE) in the human rights field. Through collaboration with civil society organisations in the Human rights legal clinic at the Faculty of law at Lund university (Människorättspraktik), she has supported students in working actual cases at the Swedish Supreme court and the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Her pedagogical work emphasises critical reflection, ethical awareness, opportunities for self-reflection and development of professional confidence, and the ability to translate legal norms into concrete institutional strategies.

Engagement with public authorities, civil society and international organisations is a defining characteristic of Bruce’s academic work.

Policy Advisory Work and Legislative Processes

Bruce has contributed to Swedish legislative processes through expert group participation, commissioned reports and consultation responses, including work on personal assistance, disability law and asylum procedures. Earlier in her career, she served as consultant to the Swedish Disability Ombudsman (now the Equality Ombudsman) during the negotiations of the CRPD at the United Nations, and worked with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on disability and treaty monitoring mechanisms.

Her advisory work focuses on strengthening the coherence between Sweden’s international human rights obligations and domestic law and policy.

Capacity Development and Professional Training

Bruce regularly conducts capacity-building programmes for practitioners in Sweden and internationally. Her training themes include:

• Human rights-based approaches in public administration
• Disability rights and inclusive governance
• Gender equality and violence against women
• Intersectionality in policy-making
• National discrimination law
• International legal interpretation

She collaborates with municipalities, regional authorities, civil society organisations and international partners to strengthen institutional capacity for rights-based governance.

Clinical Legal Education with Civil society

Through collaboration with civil society organisations in the Human rights legal clinic at the Faculty of law at Lund university (Människorättspraktik), Bruce supports students in working actual cases at the Swedish Supreme court and the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. By connecting students with professional lawyers in civil society organisation, this outreach activity becomes a win-win for both.

Public Communication

Bruce contributes actively to public debate through policy briefs, reports, blogs, podcasts and educational films. Her outreach work translates complex legal standards into accessible guidance for decision-makers and the broader public. Recent outputs include tools and educational materials on implementing a human rights-based approach in local government, as well as analysis of systemic challenges in implementing the CRPD in Sweden.