This event explores how the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) affects the rights of refugees and other protection-seeking migrants. Key issues are the role of the GCM in providing alternative pathways to protection, its relevance for economic and social rights independent of a protection status, as well as its potential to strengthen the rights of protection-seeking migrants in the context of immigration detention. The forum brings together a wide range of scholars and practitioners involved in the global governance of migration and the international protection regime.
The forum is one of three Expert Forums organized by the PROTECT project in 2021, all of which seek to explore the legal potential and impacts of the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 870761. The content of this event does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed in the event lies entirely with the authors.
Chair: Jürgen Bast, Professor of Public Law and European Law at Justus Liebig University Gießen (JLU)
Cathryn Costello is Professor of Fundamental Rights, and Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School, Berlin, and Andrew W Mellon Professor in International Refugee and Migration Law, at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She is co-editor with Michelle Foster and Jane McAdam of the Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law (OUP 2021). Her monograph on the Human Rights of Migrants and Refugees in European Law (OUP 2015) was co-awarded the 2016 Odysseus Academic Prize for 'outstanding academic research in the area of European Immigration or Asylum Law'. As well as international refugee and migration law, she also studies the intersection of migration and labour law, and is co-editor (with Professor Mark Freedland) of Migrants at Work: Immigration and Vulnerability in Labour Law (OUP 2014). She contributed to several studies for the European Parliament and UNHCR (most recently on Article 31 of the Refugee Convention). She is currently the PI of an ERC project, RefMig, on mobility, status and rights in the global refugee and migration regimes (www.refmig.org).
Stéphane Jaquemet is ICMC’s Director of Policy since February 2018. He is a lawyer and an experienced humanitarian professional with substantial expertise in the policy field. Before joining ICMC, Stéphane spent 25 years working with the UN Refugee Agency, with assignments in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Most recently, he was UNHCR’s Regional Representative for Southern Europe, based in Rome. Prior to that, he served in UNHCR headquarters as Senior Legal Advisor, then Chief of Section, Protection Capacity and Promotion of Refugee Law. He has also worked at the International Committee of the Red Cross as a delegate in Africa and the Middle East and as a Legal Officer in Geneva.
Katharina Ahrendts, Director for the United Nations and Counterterrorism, the German Federal Foreign Office
Katharina Ahrendts assumed her position as Director for the United Nations and Counterterrorism in the German Federal Foreign Office in August 2021. Previously, she served as Head of the State Secretaries’ Office. As Head of Division for International Order, UN Security Council, General Assembly, Peacekeeping and UN Sanctions from 2018 to 2020, she managed Germany’s tenure on the UN Security Council in 2019/2020. Prior to this, she was posted to the Permanent Representation of Germany to the European Union in Brussels, where she served as Germany’s Deputy Representative to the Political and Security Committee of the EU. Before that, she served at the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations in New York, in the Western Balkans division
of the Foreign Office and in the office of the German Foreign Minister, mostly focusing on security policy and multilateralism. She holds a law degree and joined the Foreign Office in 2001.
Chair: Elspeth Guild, Professor of Law at Queen Mary University London
Refugee admission through regular migration routes: The impact of the GCM on complementary pathways to protection
Pauline Endres de Oliveira, Research Fellow, Justus Liebig University Giessen
Pauline Endres de Oliveira is a lawyer and research fellow at the Justus-Liebig University Giessen. In her PhD project, she focusses on safe and regulated access to protection in the EU. Pauline teaches refugee law at the Humboldt University Berlin (Refugee Law Clinic) and is tutor of the MA Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies at the University of London. Previously, she worked as lawyer with focus on migration law and Consultant of UNHCR Germany during the implementation of the national humanitarian admission programs for Syrian refugees from 2013 to 2015. From 2017 to 2019, she was board member of Amnesty International Germany, responsible for Amnesty’s national policies on asylum and access to protection.
Refugees as migrant workers: The GCM and labour migration as alternative pathway to protection in the EU
Dr. Zvezda Vankova, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Lund University
Zvezda Vankova is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Law Faculty of Lund University. She was previously a researcher at the Department of European and International Law and the Institute for Transnational and Euregional Cross- border Cooperation and Mobility (ITEM) of Maastricht University. Zvezda holds a PhD in Law from Maastricht University and has been awarded a starting grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as a principal investigator of the project “Refugees as Migrant Workers. Labour migration as an alternative to refugee protection in the EU context?”. She is the author of the monograph ‘Circular Migration and the Rights of Migrant Workers in Central and Eastern Europe. The EU Promise of a Triple Win Solution’ (2020).
Chair: Idil Atak, Associate Professor at Ryerson University
The GCM and the EU New Pact for Migration and Asylum
Felix Braunsdorf, Policy Officer for Migration and Development, Friedrich Ebert Foundation
Felix Braunsdorf works as policy officer for Migration and Development at the Department for Global and European Policy at the German political foundation Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). As member of the editorial team of the FES theme portal “Displacement, Migration, Integration”, he is responsible for international refugee and migration policy. He recently published the study “Spotlight – Migration and Covid-19” (FES, 2021), and is author of a number of articles on development-oriented migration policies, root causes of forced migration and UN global migration governance. He was involved in the process that led to the Global Compact on Migration and is working with migrant and trade union organizations for a development-oriented and rights-based implementation of the migration goals.
Socio-economic rights of protection-seeking migrants: The impact of the GCM on access to basic services
Dr. Annick Pijnenburg, Assistant Professor in International and European Law at Radboud University
Dr. Annick Pijnenburg is Assistant Professor in International and European Law at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She has an interdisciplinary background, combining social sciences (BA) and law (LLB, LLM). Her research interests include migration deals and accountability for human rights violations. Annick’s PhD thesis examined migration deals between sponsor States in the Global North and partner States in the Global South and their effects on the socio-economic rights of people on the move. More specifically, it examines to what extent partner and sponsor States have obligations under international human rights law to realise their socio-economic rights, and to what extent & how international law assigns responsibility to the various states involved.
Chair: Janna Wessels, Assistant Professor at VU University Amsterdam
De facto detention at EU borders: The impact of the GCM on the situation of protection-seeking migrants in asylum border procedures
Dr. Marcelle Reneman, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, VU University Amsterdam
Marcelle Reneman is assistant professor of migration law in the department of administrative and constitutional law at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her research focuses on EU and national procedural law, in particular in the context of migration and asylum procedures. She has published about the EU right to an effective remedy and in particular evidentiary assessment, judicial review and the role of time in asylum procedures. Together with Galina Cornelisse she carried out a legal assessment of border procedures in the European Union for the European Parliamentary Research Service, which was published in November 2020.
Detention of protection-seeking children: Does the GCM make a difference?
Verena Knaus, Global Chief, Migration and Displacement, UNICEF
Verena Knaus is Senior Migration Advisor at UNICEF, providing support and guidance to UNICEF country offices globally on policy and programmes for refugee and migrant children. She leads on UNICEF’s global engagement with the Global Migration and Refugee Compacts, working in partnership with civil society organization, UN agencies and other stakeholders. Prior to this, Verena spent five years as Senior Policy Advisor in the UNICEF EU office. Verena authored three UNICEF reports on the experiences and impact of repatriation and returns on vulnerable children, including on their psycho-social health. From 2008 – 2012, she provided strategic advice to the Kosovo Ministry of European Integration and the mayor of Mitrovica, focusing on the rule of law, visa liberalization, local economic development and interethnic reconciliation.