So thank you very much, Professor Bendel. It's really a delight to be here. In a way,

I feel like I'm in two places at a time, the city of Erlangen and here at the university,

which is so known for its track record in the field of human rights and for the human rights

center and for the wonderful research that's done and for the very good students it has,

and then also in the city of Nuremberg, which of course has really for many, many years manifested

itself and worked on the idea of being a human rights city. And when I was flying here this

morning I was thinking about how many markers in the field of international law are actually

named after cities. You have the Nuremberg Charter, you have the Treaty of Maastricht,

you have the San Francisco Charter, there's many other examples. The Treaty of Utrecht.

I didn't want to be too much patriotic in that regard now that we're not at the World

Championship. No, I won't talk about the World Championship here. Anyway, yes, Treaty of

Utrecht is also a very good example. Yet, as Marcus Kajewski very rightfully mentioned,

when we think about international law, when we think about human rights, we always focus

on states. And I think a key thread in my presentation today will be the need to really

think through the role of cities in furthering and implementing international human rights

law, also from a legal perspective. Well, the occasion for talking about this has I

think already very well been set out by my predecessors. I too was struck by the example

of the Aquarius a few weeks ago and by the contrast between the Italian position and

that of a number of cities. One of those cities was Barcelona. Here you see the mayor of Barcelona,

Ada Colau, who stands here at the opening of a shame counter. I don't know if anyone

has seen this in Barcelona. In Barcelona, they have a, you can say it's a work of art,

you can say it's a digital manifest, but they have a statue that counts the amount of people

who died crossing the Mediterranean in the current year. And in a way, this is a reminder

to the people of Barcelona of the drama happening as we speak on the Mediterranean, but also

of what is felt as a urban responsibility to address the consequences of migration.

So this is one example, but you see examples like that all over the world. Another one

which some of you might have been following is the rise of sanctuary cities in the United

States. Again, you have the example of a national government that's becoming more and more conservative

with very strict immigration policies. And this is coupled to a situation in which more

and more cities, but also counties and also states in the US manifest themselves as sanctuary

cities. Now in the US context, being a sanctuary city means that cities don't cooperate fully

with the federal deportation agency and that when they arrest someone, they have the option

of detaining that person for the person to be deported if it concerns an irregular migrant.

And these are all cities, counties and states that refuse to do that. And in that sense

also really decouple their local policies from national migration policies.

Well another instance, a much broader one was already hinted upon by Marcus Kajewski.

It's the rise worldwide of human rights cities. A few years ago we wrote a book about this

with a number of colleagues and I was personally struck by the amount of cities all over the

world that somehow take international law, international human rights law as a basis

for their local policies. And this can be in the field of women's rights, it can be

in the field of children's rights, it can be in the field of human rights generally,

but you also increasingly see this in the field of migration and refugee rights. So

for instance the World Forum of Human Rights Cities, which meets in Guangzhou later this

year, will really have as a theme the refugee rights and the rights of migrants more generally.

So the theme of today is indeed the role, the increasing role played by cities in refugee

rights in particular, in human rights in general. And what I'd like to contribute to the discussion

is first a bit of background on the topic, asking the question why we see this development

happening, to then on the basis of our research up to now theorise a bit on why it is that

some cities are more welcoming than others, what are explanatory factors there, how do

local settings matter. And I want to focus on a number of elements which I thought would