Well, thank you very much for the invitation from the University of Erlangen, Nuremberg,

to participate at this conference.

I'm glad that I have been able to come this time.

I couldn't do it on a prior occasion.

And I will try to contribute in my presentation to eliminate the stereotype that we Latin

Americans have, that is that we speak too long.

So I will try to be as short as possible.

Let's see if I can accomplish that task.

Quite often people ask me, especially students, where my mandate as a Special Rapporteur on

the Human Rights of Migrants also includes the refugees.

And what I always respond to them is that the mandate doesn't include the refugees as such,

that is, persons who have been officially granted such status.

But as long as a person doesn't get the status as an asylum seeker or for other reasons cannot

get any sort of possibility of getting the status of refugee, it will be addressed by

the mandate I'm holding, which means that there are more people who should be refugees

than refugees themselves.

And my mandate has quite a broad scope in this regard.

And I can see this in all regions around the world, in Africa, in the South Pacific, in

Latin America, for instance, with the Venezuelans.

UNHCR has said that as Venezuelans, for instance, are escaping for a humanitarian crisis, these

persons should be granted, those in mobility should be granted the status of refugee.

In fact, only 5% of those who have applied for the status of refugee from Venezuela have

been granted the status.

So they remain as migrants and usually as irregular ones.

As you know and as Catherine was explaining, there are two different frameworks from the

international system regarding refugees and migrants, the one on refugees, which is quite

well settled in normative terms, but which doesn't work well in practice as many people

don't get the chance to get the refugee status, although they may deserve it.

And at the same time, there are frameworks on migration, quite precarious, I would say,

which has just been built over the last few years or after some initiatives that failed

in the past.

I think it is very important to put the approach on migration in the broader context of the

human rights situation around the world, as we have been speaking at this conference.

As you know, there are many xenophobic governments in the different regions of the world, but

there are also countries which, while not having a xenophobic discourse, have adopted

migration policies over the last few years, including some countries in the European Union,

which are quite restrictive with the human rights of migrants, but at the same time,

these countries keep at the international fora a discourse about the protection of human

rights beyond the issue of migration.

So there is a two-sided approach from a number of countries, especially from the Western

hemisphere.

As I become older, last year I was invited to publish a selection of my articles in a

book which was published in Mexico.

And one of the articles I selected was from the mid-1990s.

This was a time of the transitions to democracy in most countries of Latin America.

And I tried to do a comparison between the extent to which human rights were part of

the culture in the Latin American countries compared to the European countries.

And of course, at that time there was a huge difference in this respect.

At that time it seemed so strong the insertion of the human rights in the European societies

that it looked like this would last for a very long time.