OUR TEAM
Aarhus University
Aarhus University (AU) has four faculties, including the Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences, covering basic research, applied research, strategic research and research based advice to the authorities. AU has 39,000 students, about 1,800 PhD students of which one in four has a foreign nationality, and a total of approximately 11,500 employees. AU has participated in 286 FP7 and 119 H2020 projects and has hosted 39 ERC projects. AU has a very successful record of accomplishment of managing large international projects, and internationalisation is part of the University’s mission. In recent years, AU has been moving up the most important ranking lists. In 2018, AU was number 111 at the Leiden Ranking and number 123 of 17.000 universities on the Times Higher Education World University Ranking. The Department of Law is part of Aarhus Business and Social Sciences. Research at the department combines classical law school scholarship and the more internationalized focus of business law, including a commitment to study the interaction between legal norms and institutions and political, social and economic developments of society. Human rights as well as migration and asylum law are a long-standing research profile at the Department, and these sub-disciplines are benefiting from the interacting aspects of legal scholarship, not least due to the strong research group in international and EU law as well as the priority given to the study of international and transnational tendencies in law in recent years.
Role in ASILE
The Department of Law and, in particular, Prof. Vedsted-Hansen has a very well-known reputation in researching migration and asylum law as well as an extensive list of publications on this matter. Aarshu and CEPS has already collaborated in multiple occasions in similar projects engaging with national researchers. An example, the project funded by OSF, ‘Offshoring Asylum and Migration in Australia, Spain, Tunisia and the US: Lessons learned and feasibility for the EU’. Aarhus University will be the leader of WP3 on International, regional and national human rights and refugee law standards. It will be also actively involved in WP1 on the Inventory of Asylum Governance Instruments and Actors (Task 1.3), as well as it will lead WP5, together with VU Amsterdam.
Team Members
Jens Vedsted-Hansen
ASILE Work package Leader –WP3 on International, regional and national human rights and refugee law standards
Short biography
Jens Vedsted-Hansen is Professor at Aarhus University, School of Law. In addition to his work as a law professor at Aarhus University, Jens Vedsted Hansen is a member of the following institutions and agencies: the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) since 2012; the Danish Equal Treatment Board (since 2015); the Danish Refugee Appeals Board (from 1987-1994 and 2013-2016); and the Danish Institute for Human Rights (from 2009 to 2016).
Nikolas Feith Tan
ASILE Researcher – Danish Institute for Human Rights (Third Linked Party to Aarhus University.
Short biography
Dr Nikolas Feith Tan is researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights (Third Linked Party to Aarhus University) where he works on refugee and asylum law. His academic work has been published in the International Journal of Refugee Law, European Journal of Migration and Law and in specialist edited volumes. In 2019, Nikolas defended his PhD dissertation, International cooperation on refugees: between protection and deterrence, which investigated bilateral cooperation in the field of migration control and asylum.
Nikolas has acted as legal consultant for UNHCR Northern Europe, Danish Refugee Council and Amnesty International Denmark on issues related to international protection.
