„Migration challenges in the post – Covid era – comparing worlwide experiences”

Sheila I. Velez Martinez 

Professor Velez Martinez is the Jack and Lovell Olender Professor of Asylum Refugee and Immigration Law, the founding Director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice, and the Director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She is also the co-founder and Principal Investigator of the School of Medicine Human Rights Clinic. She also recently established the Heinz Afghan Asylum Project to represent Afghan asylum seekers that have recently arrived. She is also part of the Pittsburgh Ukrainian Relief Coalition (PURC). She has practiced immigration law for more than 20 years and has participated in national litigation to secure the rights of immigrants and refugees. She has lectured extensively on immigration and asylum related issues. Her other research interest include: immigrant women, critical pedagogy, internal displacement and critical theory. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies. She serves on the Board of Friends of Farmworkers of PA and the Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory Inc. (LatCrit). Professor Velez Martinez also serves as the NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative for the University of Pittsburgh. Originally from Puerto Rico, she lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their two children.

Justyna Segeš Frelak

Justyna Segeš Frelak is a Senior Policy Advisor for Legal Migration and Integration at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development. She works on labour migration, migration governance and integration. Justyna graduated from the International Relations at the Warsaw School of Economics and Eastern European Studies at the University of Warsaw. From 2004 to 2017 she was working at the Institute of Public Affairs (Poland) as the Head of the Migration Program and senior analyst. At her previous work she focused on migration policy development, intra-EU mobility, integration of migrants and refugees in Poland and discrimination. She was a visiting researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), Oxford University, Policy Fellow at Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative (OSF).

Associate Professor of International Law, Comparative Law and New Technologies at and Fellow of the Graduate Research Programme in Law at the University of Minas Gerais. Head of the Centre for Transnational and Comparative Legal Studies. Former Visiting Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and Weizenbaum Institute for the Connected Society, Berlin. Member of the American Association for International Private Law-Asadip and Brazilian Association of International Law.

Laurynas Bieksa

Laurynas Bieksa is a Lithuanian national, an associate professor in Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania (lecturing since 2002). He is also a practicing advocate (practicing since 2001). He was the judge in the Court of Honor of the Lithuanian Bar Association (2014 – 2018). Laurynas Bieksa has been reading the guest lectures on the subjects of Refugee Law and International Human Rights Protection in the universities of Moldova, Ukraine, Netherlands, Hungary and Poland as well. In 2008 he defended his PhD in the field of asylum law. In addition to asylum law, other fields of his academic research and legal practice are migration law and international human rights law. Representing the Lithuanian Red Cross, in 2002-2004, Laurynas Bieksa was the member of the Executive Board of European Council on Refugee and Exiles (ECRE), and he has participated in many international researches organised by ECRE, the Odysseus Academic Network of Asylum and Immigration Experts, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, the Red Cross and other organisations. His primary authored works on this topic include: Trends in the qualification of asylum claims related to gender-based violence under international and European Law (2021) ; Study on Return and Removal of Third-Country Nationals (2015); Problems in Implementing the Prohibition of Incitement to National and Religious Hatred (2013); In Search of Fair and Effective Asylum Procedure: the Attempts of Lithuania to Implement the Council Directive 2005/85/EC (2013); Establishing the Institution of National Reporter on Human Trafficking in Lithuania (2012); Detention of Asylum Seekers and Alternatives to Detention in Lithuania (2011). He speaks English and Russian in addition to his native language, Lithuanian.

Alan Desmond

Alan Desmond has been a lecturer at Leicester Law School in the UK since September 2016. His work has been published in leading international journals including the European Journal of International Law; Human Rights Law Review; the International Journal of Law in Context; and the Leiden Journal of International Law. He is the editor of the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law and Chair of Leicester City of Sanctuary’s New Evidence Search Team (NEST), a group of volunteer caseworkers assisting unsuccessful asylum seekers to identify and locate new evidence for a fresh asylum claim.

Tímea Drinóczi

Visiting Professor – Faculty of Law, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

Tímea Drinóczi is a Hungarian professor of law, currently a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. She served as a full professor at the University of Pécs (Hungary) and Kenyatta University (Kenya). She is an independent expert of OSCE ODIHR on constitutional and legislative matters. Her newest co-authored book is Illiberal Constitutionalism in Poland and Hungary: The Deterioration of Democracy, Misuse of Human Rights and Abuse of the Rule of Law (Routledge 2022). Besides illiberal constitutionalism, her research interest covers constitutional identity, constitutional change, and the quality of legislation.

Tamás Molnár

Tamás Molnár is legal research officer at the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) in Vienna. He is also a visiting lecturer on international migration law at the Department of International Relations at Corvinus University of Budapest (where he has held multiple positions since 2003). Before joining FRA, he worked for a decade in various ministries in Hungary on international and EU migration law. He was also a delegate in migration-related EU Council preparatory bodies and negotiated readmission agreements. He read law in Budapest and Brussels (LLM in EU law) and holds a PhD in international law, followed by his “habilitation” (post-doctoral research hand teaching qualification) in 2022. He published widely in the fields of international and EU migration law and relationship of legal orders. His latest monograph is titled “The Interplay between the EU’s Return Acquis and International Law” (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021).

Srdjan Vujovic

Dr. Srdjan Vujovic currently achieving his mission as a Strategy & Quality Assurance Lead at World Vision International and a Senior researcher (and COE) at Evidence-Based Development International. Since 2010 he has been actively conducting scientific and policy social research in human rights and governance and supporting initiatives toward building sustainable ‘bridges’ between science and practice. As a professor, he is cooperating with several universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and abroad.

Dr Sarah Ganty (biogram)

Agenda:

12.00 – 12.10 – Opening of the meeting – prof. Anna Kosińska, University of Szczecin

12.10 – 12.25 – Introductory speech: Covid impact on US Immigration Policy – prof. Sheila Valez Martinez, University of Pittsburgh – School of Law

12.25 – 12.40 – Fundamental rights issues when controlling EU external borders: a reality check, Dr. Tamas Molnar, Justice, Digital and Migration Unit, European Union Fundamental Rights Agency

12.40 – 12.55 – Integration of Ukrainian refugees: The road Ahead, Dr. Justyna Segeš Frelak, Senior Policy Advisor for Legal Migration and Integration at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development

12.55 – 13.10 – The Reaction of Lithuania to the Large Influx of Asylum Seekers in the Context of International and EU Law, Dr. Laurynas Bieksa, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnus

13.10 – 13.25 – Regularisation as a Response to Irregular Migration in a Post-COVID World: The Experience of Ireland, Dr. Alan Desmond, University of Leicester

13.25 – 13.40 – The evidence-based decision-making in a mixed-migration response in BiH: What works?, Dr. Srdan Vulovic, World Vision International, Evidence-Based Development International

13.40 – 13.55 – Migration, identity, and emerging illiberalism: lessons learned from Hungary, prof. Drinóczi, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

13.55-14.10 – Private international law, migration & technologies – new challenges arising from cross-border surveillance and disinformation, Prof. Fabricio Polido, Federal University of Minas Gerais

14. 10 – 14.25 – Unlawful Nationality-Based Bans from the Schengen Zone: Poland, Finland and the Baltic Sates against Russian Citizens and EU Law, Dr. Sarah Ganty, Human Rights Center of Ghent University

14.25 – 14.50 – Discussion

14.50 – 15.00 – Closing of the meeting