On March 4, 2022, the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) was activated as a response to a mass influx of Ukrainian refugees. The Directive was ratified by the EU member states already in 2001, following the events of the refugee crisis caused by the Kosovo conflict. Still, it remained unemployed until 2022, when Europe faced yet-another intra-regional conflict. The implementation of TPD has generated a heated academic debate regarding the Directive’s essence and the motivations behind its implementation. Varying from geopolitics to racism, many reasons have been provided when reasoning the Directive’s current implementation and previous non-implementation. This thesis studied the implementation through a critical migration theory lens, with the aim of locating economic motivations impacting the decision to activate the Directive. Therefore, by utilizing the question ‘How can the motivations for implementing the Temporary Protection Directive be understood in light of the Directive’s economic aspects?’ for this particular purpose, the thesis found that the economic aspects of the Directive come to the fore both in commodification as well as selectivity of migration policy. First, the TPD beneficiaries’ unique migration category is generated through its differentiation of legal rights in – and access to – the host country when compared to the refugee status and subsidiary protection. And second, the TPD has the ability to select and therefore target specific groups through its limited scope of protection to cover either a specific country or geographical area. In this way, the thesis contributed to the discussion regarding the logic behind the implementation of TPD.

In 2019 the European Union presented a new directive, Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and the council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law. An EU-directive needs to be implemented into the national law of every member state, which for Sweden resulted in a new law regarding whistle-blowing: Law (2021:819) about protection for persons reporting misconduct, or in Swedish, Lag (2021:819) om skydd för personer som rapporterar om missförhållanden. The directive is a minimum directive, which means that all of its content needs to be implemented into national law, but there is no stopping member states from giving further protection than the directive. This paper aims to analyse the new Swedish law, how it differs from the directive and earlier Swedish law regarding whistleblowing, how it interacts with other Swedish regulations and most importantly if and how the new law strengthens the protection of whistleblowers. Our focus will be on the perspective of the employee and what the new law can mean for them, along with discussing differences in protection between the public and private sector.  In order to fulfil our purpose we will in our legal investigation first present some background information surrounding whistleblowing to create an understanding of the concept and its importance. Then we will follow the legal hierarchy and firstly present information surrounding international and EU-law, then present relevant Swedish regulations that are of importance to whistleblowing. Furthermore there will be a presentation of both the old Swedish law regarding whistleblowing and the new Swedish law and how it is based off of the directive. During the legal investigation some case law, both from the European Court of Human Rights and the Swedish court, will be presented to explain some background to the origin of the EU-directive and to analyse if and how the new Swedish law could be of help in the Swedish case. Finally there will be an analysis based on our legal investigation where we answer and discuss our research question.

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The aim of this essay is to study and examine the EU's anti-trafficking measures in relation to human rights. This study will be a policy study on EU policy documents. In this study, a main question and a sub-question have been selected which read:What anti-trafficking measures has the EU presented between the years 2012-2016 to prevent trafficking? Are human rights associated with trafficking?  The theory that comes into use consists of the neo-institutional theory and its three pillars presented by Scott. R. Also presented is a short section of President Bush's speech in 2003 on trafficking  Under the strategies several measures are categorized. Two out of many measures presented are: Ensuring preventive financial investigations and integrating the EU's external functions. Regarding the question of human rights and trafficking and if they are related to each other. It has indicated that these two have a close connection with each other. As human rights and the fight against trafficking are highly established.

Leadership and Military Power – Can a Leadership Approach Provide a Competitive Advantage? When does a military commander's leadership approach give his or her unit a performance advantage? U.S. Army senior leaders have asserted that forces led using the mission command approach will have an edge in future combat. Mission command decentralizes decision-making to empower subordinates to react more successfully and seize battlefield opportunities. American forces have struggled to employ mission command partly because of a lack of understanding of the approach. This study applied two concepts from organizational psychology, empowering leadership and directive leadership, to better define and examine mission command and an opposing approach, detailed command. I observed three combat-like exercises at the U.S. Army's Combat Training Centers to evaluate the impact of leadership on unit performance. Using qualitative data gained from my observations and interviews with unit leaders, I found that empowering leadership/ mission command could provide significant advantages to units with high team experience. However, I found that empowered units with low team experience tended to perform worse than similar units led by directive leadership/ detailed command.

Lately, whistleblower scandals have received more and more attention in the media. Whistleblowers who blow the whistle about internal misconduct and breaches in the workplace are often subject to retaliation that affects their finances, health, and reputation. Protection of whistleblowers against retaliation acts as a safeguard for freedom of expression and freedom and pluralism of the media. Retaliations can exist of early termination or cancellation of an employment or service contract, harassment, loss of income, coercion, business boycotting, or blacklisting. The protection of whistleblowers within the European Union (EU) has been fragmentary for a long time. Some member states have had a high level of protection and detailed legislation, but some member states have had a total absence of such legislation. Therefore, the EU decided to establish a directive, Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law (the whistleblower directive or the directive) with common minimum standards for the protection of persons reporting of breaches of Union law. The purpose of the directive is to protect whistleblowers, facilitate the process when reporting and enhance the freedom of speech. Although, the directive has received criticism that the legislation regarding the internal channels that shall be used for reporting is mitigating the purpose of the directive. The directive contains an obligation in the articles 8.1-3 for legal entities in the private sector with at least 50 workers to establish channels and procedures for internal reporting. Article 8.6 stipulates that legal entities starting with 50 up to 249 workers are allowed to share certain resources regarding the internal reporting channels. The wording of the article gives no guidance on how the rules apply to a corporate group. Also, the directive does not contain any definition regarding the word legal entities and what it comprehends. The obscurity of the directive regarding sharing internal reporting channels for corporate groups has led to a debate within the union. Representatives from big corporate groups illustrate the possible inconveniences with the legislation if it does not allow corporate groups to share internal reporting channels. This has resulted in various implementations in the member states, where e.g., Sweden’s national implementation of the directive gives no opportunity for corporate groups to share internal reporting channels, compared to Denmark where corporate groups are allowed to share internal reporting channels. This thesis concludes that the directive shall be interpreted in a way that prohibits corporate groups to share internal reporting channels. The outcome of the interpretation that corporategroups cannot share internal reporting channels results in inter alia increased economic and administrative burden for legal entities, as well as a difficulty to be consistent with the whistleblowing procedure within the group. The fact that the whistleblower needs to report to the legal entity where the person is employed and not to a parent company also makes it easier for the whistleblowing department that receives and processes the reports to conjecture the identity of the whistleblower. Sweden’s interpretation of the directive regarding the internal reporting channels is therefore in line with the whistleblower directive, compared to Denmark where the legislator has opened to allow corporate groups to share internal reporting channels, even though the interpretation is not in accordance with the whistleblower directive.

The European Union's Directive 2008/115/EC and Member States implementation thereof, subject Third Country Nationals awaiting for return/removal from the European Union, and its subgroup of non-returnable Third Country Nationals, to conditions of cooperation in order to access human rights. This creates a tension in relation to the principle of non-discrimination in that all individuals, regardless of migration status, are to access their rights. Nevertheless, the concept of cooperation is about to be expanded in the European Union's regulations on migration. This thesis assesses the prevailing legal understandings of the concept, within the European Union and across its Member States, against the principle of non-discrimination. The conclusion of how these understandings fare is that it depends. It depends on what method of legal interpretation is used when interpreting the concept and against which general interest of the European Union it is being compared against; that of the prerogative to exercise border control or that of protecting fundamental rights.

High-level parallel programming approaches, such as OpenACC, have recently become popular in complex fluid dynamics research since they are cross-platform and easy to implement. OpenACC is a directive-based programming model that, unlike low-level programming models, abstracts the details of implementation on the GPU. Although OpenACC generally limits the performance of the GPU, this model significantly reduces the work required to port an existing code to any accelerator platform, including GPUs. The purpose of this research is twofold: to investigate the effectiveness of OpenACC in developing a portable and maintainable GPU-accelerated code, and to determine the capability of OpenACC to accelerate large, complex programs on the GPU. In both of these studies, the OpenACC implementation is optimized and extended to a multi-GPU implementation while maintaining a unified code base. OpenACC is shown as a viable option for GPU computing with CFD problems. In the first study, a CFD code that solves incompressible cavity flows is accelerated using OpenACC. Overlapping communication with computation improves performance for the multi-GPU implementation by up to 21%, achieving up to 400 times faster performance than a single CPU and 99% weak scalability efficiency with 32 GPUs. The second study ports the execution of a more complex CFD research code to the GPU using OpenACC. Challenges using OpenACC with modern Fortran are discussed. Three test cases are used to evaluate performance and scalability. The multi-GPU performance using 27 GPUs is up to 100 times faster than a single CPU and maintains a weak scalability efficiency of 95%. / Master of Science

Yes / This paper considers the definitions of spouse, civil partner and partner in European Union free movement of persons law in order to question the EU’s heterocentric approach to defining ‘family’ in this context. It argues that the terms ‘spouse’ should include same sex married partners to ensure there is no discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. It further highlights the problems created by basing free movement rights of civil partners on host state recognition of such partnerships. This approach allows Member States to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation and is therefore not compatible with EU equality law in others areas. The position of unmarried or unregistered partners is also considered. In particular the paper examines the requirement of a duly attested durable relationship and its impact on same-sex partners wishing to move from one Member State to another. The paper argues that it is time to reconsider the law in this area and bring it in line with the EU’s commitment to eliminate discrimination on several grounds including sexual orientation.

As required by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) of the European Union, this thesis thoroughly examines the transition in corporate sustainability reporting from limited to reasonable assurance. The directive is being implemented at a crucial time as companies are progressively incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into their core operating and reporting practices. The CSRD is intended to improve sustainability disclosures’ comparability, credibility and reliability. It is a legislative response to a larger movement for more corporate accountability and transparency. The study uses a qualitative technique using semi-structured interviews with professionals from leading audit firms. The purpose of these interviews is to provide many aspects of the transition with a particular emphasis on how businesses and audit firms are modifying their operations to comply with the stricter requirements of the CSRD. The study identifies the main factors behind this shift such as increased stakeholder demands for transparency and a changing regulatory environment that makes it necessary to reevaluate current assurance practices.  The study’s important conclusion is that putting reasonable assurance requirements into practice is difficult. Companies must create advanced data management systems that can handle the CSRD’s requirements for an increasing volume of information. In addition to ensuring data accuracy, these systems need to make it easier to analyse and report on the data in a way that complies with the new assurance standards.  Additionally, the shift needs a major improvement in auditor competencies. It is necessary for auditors to have a better understanding of both traditional financial auditing and the specific challenges presented by sustainability reporting. This includes having a thorough understanding of ESG factors and how they affect risk profiles and corporate performance. Hence, the CSRD acts as a catalyst for a significant shift in auditors’ professional development and training, emphasising the necessity to combine sustainability with financial auditing skills.  Strong internal controls are also important, as the research shows. Establishing and maintaining strict internal mechanisms is necessary for businesses to ensure the reliability of their sustainability reports. This involves a thorough review and a redesign of internal processes in order to meet the higher standards of reasonable assurance. These controls are essential for reducing the risks associated with sustainability reporting such errors or misrepresentations which can have a big influence on stakeholder trust and regulatory compliance.  This change has significant implications for society at large. Companies may give stakeholders more reliable and detailed disclosures about their sustainable practices by shifting toward reasonable assurance. This can have a big impact on investment choices and build stakeholder confidence. This shift promotes a more transparent and sustainable corporate environment by supporting the incorporation of ESG factors into core business strategies and by strengthening the credibility of sustainability reports.