August 6th, 2025, marked the opening of the third edition of the Rio School on Global Governance, Democracy and Human Rights, one of the initiatives of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on EU-LA Global Challenges (CEJM), co-funded by the European Union. Professor Paula Wojcikiewicz Almeida gave the opening lecture, in which she introduced the CEJM’s main activities and the course’s lectures.

The Rio School is a four-month in-person programme, taught in English, aimed at expanding knowledge on International Organizations’ practices on Global Governance. The lectures address a variety of topics within the Centre’s main research areas. It intends to shed light on the understanding of the European Union’s role as a global regulator, its emergence as a normative actor, the normative authority of new subjects and non-State actors in shaping international organizations’ law and their relevance to global governance. It assesses multilevel and informal decision-making mechanisms in the European and international spheres and their impact on global regulation.

The Rio School offers students the opportunity to learn from globally renowned lecturers and practitioners on the main practice fields in international law and international relations. By combining theory and practice methodology, the course’s curriculum proposes a North-South critical view on current approaches to global governance and aims to increase awareness of the European Union's and Brazil’s common interests and shared values.

The present edition will feature renowned national and international professors, such as Régis Dandoy (Centre for European Studies at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito), Kai Enno Lehmann (USP), Jed Odermatt (City St. George’s — University of London), Hussein Kallout (CEBRI - Centro Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais), Leonardo de Andrade (FGV Direito Rio), Monique Sochaczewski, Ph.D. (IDP), Frédéric Mégret (McGill University), María Carmelina Londoño Lázaro (Universidad de La Sabana), Daniel Damásio (USP), Ramona Coman (Université Libre de Bruxelles) e Gustavo G. Müller (KU Leuven). It received over 100 applications, from national and international candidates coming from fields such as Law, International Relations, and Communications, ranging from undergraduate students to established professionals.