Public Services and Actualisation of Rights

This chapter highlights that public services serve as a crucial interface for the actualisation of fundamental human and civil rights, especially for marginalised populations such as immigrants. It begins by exploring the academic debate on migration, integration, and the exercise of the right to access the city, highlighting the need for a quality standard to assess the enabling capacity of public services from the perspective of service users. It also aims to explore how the transition to digitalisation of public services and related policies often creates new barriers, especially for non-native citizens. The chapter then introduces the Mediation Grammar (MG), a user-centric quality standard developed by the easyRights project, defining its core purpose and measuring the empowerment gaps of the service users across the three pillars of language accessibility, information adequacy, and actualisation of rights.