Keynote speakers

Aleksandra Oszmiańska-Pagett

Chair of the European Committee of Experts

President at European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Aleksandra Oszmiańska-Pagett is an expert in language policy and minority language rights, with over 15 years of experience serving as a member of the Council of Europe Committee of Experts for the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and its current Chair. She has been actively involved in monitoring the Charter’s implementation through visits to various European countries (e.g. UK, Sweden, Denmark, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia) and advising on domestic legislation and policies related to regional and minority languages. Additionally, she has engaged with countries not yet parties to the convention, including Portugal and Ireland, to foster dialogue between NGOs, local, and central authorities. Her research interests intersect with language rights, identity, culture, and policymaking, particularly focusing on children’s and youth’s needs. She has published extensively on these topics, including Children’s Rights under ECRML (2016). She also co-designed a Toolkit for Classroom Activities on Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights (2019). Oszmiańska-Pagett is a full-time lecturer on European Language Policy and Linguistic Identity at the S.B. Linde College of Modern Languages, Poznań, Poland.

Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones

University of Wales

Professor Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones is Director of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, an interdisciplinary research centre of 25 staff, and home to the Etxepare Basque Institute’s Alan R King Chair in Sociolinguistics. Her work in the field of European minoritised languages spans three decades: in language planning, policy, revitalisation, education and media, including as Council of Europe expert. She currently leads the Civil Society and Governance portfolio of e-COST Plurilingmedia and work package ‘Education, Transmission and Socialization’ of Horizon FOSTERLANG. She chairs the Collaborative Research Network on Welsh and bilingual education, and co-chairs the Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities. She is President of ELEN – European Language Equality Network – the pan-European NGO representing minoritized languages.

Karin van der Worp

University of the Basque Country, EHU

Karin van der Worp holds a PhD in Education from the University of the Basque Country (EHU). Her doctoral dissertation, "Multilingualism in the Workplace: the voice of professionals", presented in 2016, received the Extraordinary Doctoral Award. She is currently an associate professor at the University of the Basque Country (EHU) in the Department of Educational Sciences. Her teaching activities are closely linked to educational research, and she teaches in the bachelor’s Degrees in Pedagogy and Social Education, as well as in the Master’s Degree in Secondary Education.

She is a member of the DREAM (Donostia Research on Education and Multilingualism) research group. Her research focuses on multilingualism and minority languages in both education and the workplace. She has presented her work at national and international scientific conferences and has published in academic journals, including: Van der Worp, K., Cenoz, J., Gorter, D. (2017). From bilingualism to multilingualism in the workplace: The case of the Basque Autonomous Community, Language Policy, 16(4), 407-432.

Mikel Artetxe

REKA/ HiTZ zentroa (EHU)

Mikel Artetxe is a researcher in the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. He is the co-founder of Reka, a startup that develops multimodal language models. He is also an academic research collaborator at the HiTZ Center of the University of the Basque Country. Previously, he worked as a research scientist at Meta AI, formerly known as Facebook AI Research. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of the Basque Country and carried out several research stays at Google, DeepMind, and Facebook AI Research. Mikel Artetxe’s research focuses on multilingual natural language processing and large language models, and he is among the inventors of unsupervised machine translation. His work has received several awards, including the Best Doctoral Thesis Award from the European Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Young Researchers in Computer Science Award from SCIE and the BBVA Foundation, as well as the Facebook Fellowship distinction.

Nicolas Levrat

United Nations

Nicolas Levrat serves as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, a mandate through which he promotes and protects the rights of minorities worldwide by engaging with governments, international organizations, and civil society. In this capacity, he examines challenges affecting minority communities, conducts country visits, and presents recommendations to the United Nations Human Rights Council and the United Nations General Assembly.

Levrat is a French speaking Swiss. As such, he is a member of a linguistic minority in Switzerland and has been dedicating his academic research and teaching focus on Peoples and minorities rights, Federalism, and on relationships between legal systems. Holding a PhD in International Law, Prof. Levrat has been a full Professor of International and European Law at the University of Geneva since 2001. His research focuses on regional integration, minority rights, decentralization, democratic governance, and the interaction between domestic and international legal systems. In addition to his academic work, Professor Levrat has advised international institutions, participated in numerous expert forums, and promoted dialogue between legal scholarship and public policymaking. Through his leadership, research, teaching, and international engagement, he continues to make important contributions to the advancement of human rights, constitutional governance, and the protection of minority communities worldwide.