I would like to welcome you on behalf of the Center for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg

here at the Friedrich-Alexander University.

Erlangen-Nürnberg, my name is Markus Grzegorzewski.

I'm the chairperson of this center, the Research Interdisciplinary Research Center on Human

Rights at our university.

And the Center for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg, the Crenn as we say, is one of the organizations

forming the corporation project Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Networking and Knowledge

Transfer or German Flucht- und Flüchtlingsforschung, Vernetzung und Transfer.

That's where the acronym FFVT comes from.

It's a little bit difficult to pronounce that in English, but I guess we can manage.

So the FFVT aims to strengthen interdisciplinary forced migration refugee research in Germany.

And it is therefore run by four different institutions.

The first is the Bonn International Center for Conversion.

The second is our center in alphabetical order, of course.

The German Development Institute, the DEA in Bonn is the third.

And then the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at the University

of Osnabrück is the fourth partner.

The whole project is a research and networking project, also transfer project.

It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

So we gratefully acknowledge the support of the ministry.

And it brings together research on migration, development, conflict, and violence, climate

change, health, governance, and human rights issues, and a number of other topics.

And the idea is really to bring researchers and institutes working on these issues in

the relevant fields together, all of them dealing with forced migration.

Another aspect of the project is, of course, also to provide young academics with teaching

and training opportunities in these areas.

Therefore, the project also plans to establish study and graduate programs.

Second edition, it promotes the internationalization of research activities in these fields in

Germany and the dialogue between academia, practitioners, media, and politicians.

And so this workshop, which we are hosting today, is of course, right at the heart of

this, we have a very large number of participants from both within Germany, but also from other

countries.

We have very distinguished panelists from Germany, but also from abroad.

So one of the ideas of the project to internationalize the research is already sort of, I don't want

to say fulfilled, but it's clear that this workshop is part of this exercise.

In addition, of course, it brings together also not just the representatives of academia,

but also civil society organizations are in the room, representatives of political actors,

political foundations, policymakers.

And we are very happy that so many of you have joined us here in Erlang, or at least

virtually, of course, here in Erlang.

At our university, I believe we bring some special expertise and research in human rights

and refugee and migration policy.

And this is an area in which many of our colleagues have been working for quite some time already.

So this is, I wouldn't say the Erlang twist to the project.

And of course, this also therefore informed the topic of today's workshop, which is flight

governance and human rights.

So we bring these two fields, human rights and governance studies together.

So as I just said, the workshop is one of the first public major outcomes of this project.

I'm very happy to see that so many of you have come.

We have more than 200 registered participants.