The winner of the 2019 Brigitte-Schnegg Prize is Dr. iur. Nula Katharina Frei. She is the author of "Menschenhandel und Asyl. Die Umsetzung der völkerrechtlichen Vorgaben zum Opferschutz im schweizerischen Asylverfahren."(Publisher: Nomos / Stämpfli 2018)

Dr. iur. Nula Frei is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of European Law at the University of Fribourg since 2017. She studied law and political science at the Universities of Zurich, Lille and Bern. She received her PhD in law from the University of Bern in 2017. From 2012 to 2017, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Public Law at the University of Berne, at the Swiss Centre for Migration Law and at the Swiss Center of Expertise in Human Rights. Nula Frei publishes widely on issues of European and Swiss constitutional law, national and international refugee and asylum law as well as on non-discrimination and data protection law.

Short summary of the book:

Human trafficking is often perceived as a strongly gendered phenomenon. Public perception regularly reduces trafficking to forced prostitution and does neither take into account other forms of human trafficking nor the deeper causes of it, which are often based on gender discrimination. Not least because of its discursive link to moral issues concerning prostitution, human trafficking is often fought less intensively than other forms of organized crime. While these biases have been taken much more seriously by police forces and cantonal migration authorities in recent years, there has so far been no similar process of reflection with regard to asylum procedures. Nula Frei's monograph points to this shortcoming and closes the gap on both a theoretical and a practical level. Her book approaches the topic from a human rights perspective and develops a coherent approach to protection of potential victims of trafficking in asylum procedures. It examines how the international legal provisions on victim protection should be implemented in the Swiss asylum procedure and makes concrete propositions to connect the two frameworks of asylum/refugee law and anti-trafficking law in Swiss practice, both on a substantive and a procedural level. Methodologically, the work is based on the analysis of case law and literature, but also on expert interviews and the analysis of asylum files of potential victims of human trafficking so as to gain and display a deeper understanding of the hitherto undocumented practice. Nula Frei’s work has contributed greatly to putting the issue of human trafficking and asylum in Switzerland on the political and legal agenda and has inter alia been cited in several landmark judgments by the Federal Administrative Court (BVGE 2016/27) and the Federal Supreme Court (2C_373/2017).

Contact: nula.frei@unifr.ch

Master thesis: Les politiques suisses de contraception ; le fédéralisme à l’épreuve du genre

A brief historic of the policies of contraception in Switzerland gives us the insight that the right of reproductive self-determination has not yet been invested as a policy. It’s possible that the right of reproductive self-determination and gendered political issues, such as contraception, are under a form of gag rule. This could come partly from the Swiss Federal System, which is based on the principles of compromise and subsidiarity. As historical examples show, cantons used their capabilities mostly to restrict or coerce women's reproductive self-determination. Indeed, the Swiss Federal System is patriarchal and gender inequalities are consistent with it. In this light, to refuse to discuss political questions directly related to women’s interests is morally problematic : it sustains a double standard of citizenship between women and men. I argue that this, in turn, could be rebalanced through a feminist national reproduction policy, that includes the issue of contraception.

Contact: ma.schnegg@gmail.com