Hello everyone. Welcome to our last lecture in the lecture series on Business and Human

Rights for this year, not for this semester, only for this year. So we'll continue in January.

It's my very pleasure today to welcome Grażyna Baranowska from the Herty School in Berlin.

Grażyna is a researcher who started her career, so to say, with her PhD on Enforced Disappearances.

And from that topic, so to say, then had a journey through a work on memory loss to now come to the

topic of missing migrants, which will be part of the lecture that she will be giving to us today.

She's at the moment a postdoctoral fellow funded through the Marie Curie program at the Herthe

School of Governance in Berlin, and more specifically at the Center for Fundamental Rights there.

She has also been an advisor on Enforced Disappearances for the German Center for the

Institute for Human Rights, and she's also an assistant professor

for the Academy of Science in Poland. And I'm very, very happy and very glad,

and of course also very honored that you're here, and I'm also very much looking forward to your

presentation and our discussion afterwards. Thanks for being with us, and the floor is yours.

Thank you. Thank you for having me, and it's really a pleasure to be here and to be able to

present some of my research and to get looking forward to get your questions and feedback and

discuss with you more. So the topic of my today's presentation is the human rights of migrants,

missing migrants in Europe and the role of business. And so let me try to fix that or not.

So, okay, there we are. So this is, it works. So it was enough that you came, apparently.

So the project that I'm currently working on and the beginning of which I am presenting today is,

the full name is Missing Migrants, Identifying and Shaping Obligations for Protection,

and the short acronym is NURO. It's funded by the European Union under the Marie Krzywowska

action, and I just started it recently in September, and it's going to last between

a half years. And here on the slide, you also see the basic goals of the projects I'm looking for,

obligations of state and international organization with regards to migrants that go missing

specifically in Europe, so on the way to reach the European Union or inside the European Union.

So today I will start with trying to discuss a bit who are missing migrants. So this is a term

that's actually widely used both in law and especially by policymakers, but who are they,

really what are we talking about, especially from a legal perspective. The second part of my

presentation today, I will talk about kind of a bit about state versus non-state actors

and missing migrants. So it will be divided into three parts. I will start with states, international

organization, and then non-state actors in various aspects. And then the third part of my presentation

will be specifically about businesses that I will also touch a bit upon in the first two parts when

relevant. So starting with the first part, who are missing migrants? So when I'm asked this question,

kind of what I like to start off with is that this is a term which is not defined and it consists of

two terms that are not defined because missing persons are not defined and migrants are not

defined. So basically we have a very non-defined term and this leads us really asking a lot of

questions. And even though this is a really very undefined term, it is present in highly important

documents. So we have it in the global compact. So Objective 8 specifically talks about missing

migrants and here's the part kind of introduction to it which also kind of points how missing

migrants are perceived, that there's an obligation that is perceived with regard to them, that the

families and the surge is kind of in the center of it. So the Objective 8 points us to kind of some

form of interpretation but also does not say us who missing migrants are. And the same is with the

European Parliament which has adopted numerous resolutions on missing migrants, like losing the

term without defining it and it can really apply to different people. So there was a resolution

recently on children concerning missing migrants or missing migrant children. There was a resolution

and this is not all of them but there was a resolution on identification of remains at the

borders of the European Union and it was a resolution that's long ago from 2012 but which

I singled out because it specifically talked about the right to truth of families of missing migrants.

So if we're talking about the right of the families that implies that we're talking about

a certain group that has the right to do that and kind of what I'm questioning when looking at the