Legal Struggles and Social Work: The Contribution of Social Workers for the Legal Mobilization of Human Rights

The contribution of social workers to strategic litigation is still underexposed in research on legal mobilization. However, social workers are essential for the identification of cases and provide the courts with important information about the facts of the cases. They also are essential for preventing affected individuals from being instrumentalized within legal struggles. Building on our respective backgrounds in legal and political science on the one hand and in social work studies on the other, we bring these perspectives together to make an initial theoretical attempt to examine how the role of social workers in legal struggles can be studied. Both authors bring theoretical and practical experience in human rights work with refugees in Germany from their respective disciplines, and they incorporate these perspectives into the analysis. Therefore, we illustrate our theoretical considerations with a concrete example of a legal struggle over the social rights of asylum seekers in Germany. In this context, we engage in our article how — at least as is often observed in Germany — human rights in social work are all too often, to put it pointedly, reduced to little more than a rhetorical slogan , rather than being applied as a concrete tool in individual cases or to influence structural change.