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Viewpoints and Advocacy
Themes and Issues |
Migrant Rights
Rights Away from Home: Workers, Women and the
World and the Convention on Migrant Workers
PART 3. THIRD "W": The World
: A brief observation about the recent report of the Global Commission
and possible new approaches to migration, labor and development.
The Global Commission on International
Migration was established in 2003 with the encouragement
of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan by a core group of 32 States
(including the Holy See) and the European Commission. Its mandate
was to provide a framework for a coherent, comprehensive and global
response to international migration, and it published its conclusions
in a report in October 2005. ICMC recognizes with great appreciation
the participation on the Global Commission of one of our own members,
the Most Rev. Nicholas DiMarzio, Bishop of Brooklyn, New York.
The report contains an extensive analysis
of current international migration causes and trends, and can
be found in English and Spanish on the Global Commission's website,
www.gcim.org.
The report also makes a number of recommendations for responding
to the challenges and opportunities of migration in the coming
years, with particular emphasis on the role, value and need to
organize the worldwide migration of labor. To touch briefly on
just two aspects:
- The Global Commission report expressed
growing demand for a major re-design of international structures
for migration. Far and away the major question of the
year in international migration is: how will the UN follow-up
on the Global Commission's principal recommendation: the
creation of a new "Inter-agency Global Migration Facility"
in 2006?
The functions of the new Facility would be to coordinate planning
and a funding framework in areas that cross the mandates of
several institutions, such as human trafficking, asylum, and
migration and development (including remittances.) In addition,
the Global Commission recommended two longer-term possibilities
for consideration "in the context of the ongoing process
of reforming the UN": a merger of UNHCR and the International
Organization for Migration into one agency covering refugees
and other migrants or the transformation of IOM into a new UN
agency for economic migrants.
Wow! It is unclear what the results of
any reform process will be or its effects-and we may
have to wait for further action at the UN High Level Dialogue
on International Migration and Development at the UN in September.
- For some, the Global Commission report illustrated
the ongoing tension between a labor and a rights approach to
migrant workers.
While emphasizing the importance of rights and repeatedly referring
to the Convention on Migrant Workers and other international rights
instruments, the Global Commission devoted a tremendous amount
of attention to the economic role of migrant labor, both in States
of employment and in States of origin.
The Committee on Migrant Workers reacted strongly to that approach,
expressing:
- disappointment that the Global Commission did not explicitly
call on States to ratify the Convention on Migrant Workers;
and
- concern that looking at migration from too much of a market
perspective runs the risk of migrants being considered as commodities
rather than human beings.
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