Prof. Dr. Lila García

Q1. Who are you? 

I am a full-time Researcher (tenured) at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in Argentina. I am also Adjunct Professor of ‘International Contemporary Politics’ and ‘Argentinean Foreign Policy’ in the Department of International Relations at University of Mar del Plata (Argentina). My research interest is on migration and human rights, particularly on the role of courts in migration control, and on new frameworks to deal with human mobility from a human rights-based approach. 

Q2. What was your motivation for applying for the FFVT fellowship? Why Germany?

The FFTV Fellowship offers the opportunity to become part of a very specialized network that allow us to put some ideas on debate within an international environment.

In that sense, Germany is the best environment to discuss the main idea of my project: how valid Hannah Arendt’s analysis on rightlessness still are, and the perplexities of human rights at protecting human mobility.  But at the same time, why and how they still pave the way to reset the question of migrant’s rights.  

Q3. What do you expect from the fellowship?

I expect to engage in a worldwide community of colleagues researching in key aspects of the future of human mobility.

Q4. What is the focus of your work, and what is innovative about it? / What are your planned outcomes and activities for the fellowship period? And how do they relate to your FFVT hosting institution/ the FFVT cooperation project?

My work reviews a key question in the field of human mobility and human rights: Why human rights fail at protecting (undocumented) migrants? Why it seems that beyond any international effort, human rights still do not reach that human beings once they become migrants?

Many scholars have already inquired about that and in addition, many of them have found that the most outstanding perplexity about human rights is still valid: Hannah Arendt’s analysis about the rightless still resonates. From that, my starting point is that there is not point in signing more human rights treaties or including clauses for precarious human mobilities since the problema is located in a previous stage: in the legal and moreover, political standing of those lives. My innovation lies in paves the way to build a new space that, by bringing together bot law and politics, allow to reinscribe that lives on the move from a human rights-based approach, which is where the Latin American experience and moreover, the Argentinean experience,  may contribute. Provisionally, let’s call that space Intermestic Law of Human Mobility. In that sense, CHREN (FAU) houses highly specialized lawyers in human rights that work also with a ‘politics perspective’.