Maciej Grześkowiak is an FWO postdoctoral fellow, although his FWO mandate is currently suspended until September 2026 due to his appointment as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Maciej is also a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative of the University of London.
Maciej’s research focuses on international and EU migration and asylum law, and he has published extensively on various aspects of international and European refugee protection frameworks. His work often employs empirical legal research, which led him to conduct case-studies and fieldwork in Lebanon, Uganda, and Poland.
Maciej holds a PhD in law from the University of Warsaw, where he also lectured in human rights law. Maciej’s doctoral thesis examined the worldwide shift from durable asylum to temporary forms of protection for refugees and other forcibly displaced persons—a trend he examined by reference to international law as well as through in-depth, interdisciplinary case studies. He introduced the concept of ‘the gap between temporary refuge and asylum’ to describe this phenomenon.
Before becoming an FWO fellow, Maciej was also active as a practitioner. He spent over two years in the Lebanese-Syrian borderlands implementing humanitarian programmes with the Polish Center for International Aid.
Upon returning to Poland, he worked at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and, since 2022, served as Chief Coordinator at the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights (Polish Ombudsman). In this capacity, he was closely involved in responding to the Polish-Belarusian border crisis and the situation of refugees from Ukraine.
At UGent, Maciej’s project explores border walls, examining their legal status and impact on access to rights through a critical lense.
