‘Migration and social policies: local, national and international perspectives’ aims to showcase some of the work of the University’s Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice.

The morning session will explore key elements of the European Union and the UK’s migration policies and their social policy implications in the UK and in Greece, with speakers Jeremy Oppenheim of the UK Border Agency; Vassilis Karydis, Professor of Law and Deputy Ombudsman (Human Rights), Greece; and Tony Bunyan, Director of Statewatch, a non-profit organisation that monitors state and civil liberties in the European Union. This will be followed by workshops on human trafficking and border controls, designed to enable in-depth discussion of the broader social policy implications of migration policies, from local and national perspectives.

The afternoon session will examine some key local, national and global ethical challenges and explore how local lessons can be drawn from international experience. Speakers are Christien van den Anker, Reader in Global Ethics, University of the West of England, and Will Guy, Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Bristol’s School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies. This will be followed by workshops designed to enable in-depth discussion of new approaches to the analysis of migration, social policy and social harm, from local, national and internationally comparative perspectives.

The European Migration Network aims to meet the information needs of Union institutions and of Member States’ authorities and institutions by providing up-to-date, objective, reliable and comparable information on migration and asylum, with a view to supporting policymaking in the European Union in these areas.