Nickey Diamond from Myanmar, who fled the military as an activist and is now doing his doctorate in Konstanz, and the Congolese professor Francine Ntoumi, who received the Federal Cross of Merit last year for her services as an infection biologist, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation - these two people are just two of hundreds who show us: With our cultural and educational work, we make a difference, worldwide.

We protect the freedom of women, men and also children, advance education and research, and sometimes we also protect their life and limb in the process.

The report on foreign cultural and educational policy that we are discussing today looks back to the year 2021. To be honest, that feels like a lifetime ago. Back then, we looked at "shrinking spaces" and had to observe how freedom of speech had shrunk in Belarus and many other countries. Today, however, we have to speak of "disappearing spaces" in many places. Human rights, such as freedom of the press in Russia, are not only shrinking; they are being swept away - also in Iran or Afghanistan.

This brute force is also changing the tasks of our cultural and educational policy. We will have to position ourselves more strategically here; for our cultural relations and education policy does not take place in a vacuum, but is also faced with the global challenges of a systemic competition between autocracies and democracies.

We know: Germany's credibility and appeal are the foundations for the success of our foreign policy. It is precisely this credibility that is being called into question in some regions by others, but sometimes also by us in our own house, and, yes, occasionally put down by crude disinformation. We must counter this more actively than in the past by unwaveringly maintaining and cooperating in the exchange with societies, in the cooperation of people and cultures of this world, by trying again and again to put ourselves in other perspectives, but also by making ourselves more understandable.

This is true for us as the Federal Government, and it is also true for our excellent intermediary organisations: Schools Abroad and DAAD, the Goethe-Institut, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and many more. Their commitment is called for as never before, because cultural policy is also quite clearly security policy. When we promote the freedom of culture, science and the media, we also strengthen the freedom and security of people.

That is why, in view of today's situation, we have expanded protection programmes such as the Hilde Domin Programme, whose first scholarship holder was Nickey Diamond from Myanmar. We have also further increased the funding for these programmes - at this point I would like to express my sincere thanks to you as parliamentarians - and have, for example, relaunched the Hannah Arendt Initiative for Journalists.

We rely on science diplomacy, as in the case of Professor Ntoumi, to join others in the fight against malaria, tuberculosis and Ebola. Of course, we also continue to rely on 13 million students worldwide learning German, because we need partners in this world who sometimes understand us in our own language, but also because we need skilled workers and scientists more and more urgently.

But because we know that the world's ten- and fifteen-year-olds may not first think of German as their first foreign language, we must also bring our foreign education policy up to date by competitively expanding degrees and improving programmes - especially in cooperation with the business community.

If we shape our cultural relations and education policy in such a targeted way, it will not be a "nice to have" in the 21st century, but an "essential to have" - urgently necessary, because it is about the people, whether in Ukraine, Myanmar or Congo, because it is about us, about their and our common freedom and security in an interconnected world.

Thank you very much.