Civil society and the struggle for a rights-based global compact

Many issues, many voices

‘Migrants’ rights’ comprise not one but many simultaneous struggles, at different levels, with particular barriers to collective action and translating and articulating a shared platform at the global level. Relative to citizens, migrants – especially migrants in irregular status – almost always face discrimination both in law and in practice, and in almost all domains of social life, including at work. Access to justice and effective remedy for even the most serious violations and exploitation are less secure or non-existent; in many cases, attempts to access justice, or services like basic or emergency health care, may expose an undocumented migrant to the risk of deportation. Although migrants’ civil society allies in rights campaigns are not in the same precarious situation on the basis of citizenship, in many countries they too face severe restrictions on their activities in support of migrants.

Migration patterns – who moves where, in what circumstances, and on what terms – vary by region and corridor, with organizing often taking on regionally specific forms. National and regional networks foster linkages and coordination of campaigns at the regional level. On the ground, local struggles have been waged against specific conditions of work, wage theft, violence, and harassment at the hands of state or non-state actors, and for migrant children’s access to education, to name just a few. Migrants’ labor rights have long been a focus of specific advocacy, both by the labor movement and migrants’ rights advocates. Among many issues, campaigns have focused on improving transparency and accountability of employers and overhauling exploitative recruitment systems, particularly in the Asia-Gulf Cooperation Council migration corridor. At the intersection of women’s rights and labor movements, the rights of women migrant workers have also motivated dedicated organizations and campaigns, for example, around domestic workers’ rights including the right to organize. Women human rights defenders and lawyers’ associations have fought gender-specific age bans on women migrants in several South- and Southeast Asian countries, and women’s groups around the world have campaigned for national ratifications of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Domestic Workers’ Convention (C189). Similarly, women’s groups in Latin America have led campaigns to solve the many open cases of enforced disappearances in the context of displacement and migration in the region.

Migrants’ rights advocacy at the global level

Twenty years ago, migrants’ rights advocates mobilized in a Global Campaign for Ratification of the United Nations (UN) International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (CMW) to get the required number of national ratifications to bring the convention, completed in 1990, into force. In a real but incomplete victory, the campaign succeeded in 2003, though without ratifications by major developed destination countries whose implementation of its provisions would materially improve the well-being of millions of migrant workers and their families. Around that same time, migration governance was garnering increasing international attention at both the regional and global levels, both within and outside the UN. However, at the global level, the state-led agenda for international cooperation was increasingly cast not in terms of rights but in terms of ‘migration management’. For major developed destination countries, the priority was on securitization of borders while restricting regular migration channels and deterring irregular migration.

Over the course of the intervening period, a diverse group of mainly migrant, faith-based, labor, and human rights organizations rooted in different countries, regions, and corridors have participated in – and consistently advocated for more space and voice within – global and regional migration governance spaces. These spaces included the UN High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development (HLD, held in 2006 and 2013) as well as, over the past decade, the annual ‘state-owned’ Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD); in the latter, civil society organizations have progressively succeeded in opening space for participation and dialogue with states, where they have continued to push a migrants’ rights agenda in primarily migration management–oriented spaces (although due to their dependence on governments’ acquiescence in providing access and sanctioning suggested topics, and to the internal selection processes determining civil society participation, debates persist around the effectiveness of the GFMD space for engaging in rights-based advocacy; to counterbalance this, civil society groups have held broader, more critical events on the GFMD margins). Some of these groups have also participated in an annual migration policy coordinating meeting held by UN DESA (Department of Economic and Social Affairs), and more recently in the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) semi-annual International Dialogue on Migration. As organizations and individuals increasingly interacted with one another across different world regions and migration corridors, they developed both formal and informal networks and coalitions. In most cases, core missions, capacity, expertise, and constituencies have remained heavily focused on national and regional/corridor advocacy even as they engaged in GFMD ‘civil society days’ and other global processes. This makes sense, given that most migration governance – and nearly all implementation – takes place at national and/or regional levels. As we discuss below, this means that effective engagement at the global level requires capacity to translate back and forth between the global and other levels, including to identify and connect with governments likely to be allies on rights-based issues.

2016 Summit and GCM process

In late 2015, amid a growing sense of crisis around large and irregular movements of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean – but also elsewhere including South and Southeast Asia and the Central/North American corridor – the UN started planning a Summit for September 2016. Although irregular movements, with a particular emphasis on ‘migrants in vulnerable situations’, were an initial focus, states set out to tackle migration governance more broadly, addressing the ‘challenges and opportunities of international migration in all its dimensions’ (GCM, para. 11). Almost from the beginning, it was clear that, however interconnected refugee and migrant issues are on the ground, the existence of a specific legal framework addressing refugee protection meant that protection of refugees and of migrants would be addressed in separate processes following the Summit. Hence the Summit outcome document, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (NYD), mandated two processes leading to the GCR (Global Compact on Refugees) and GCM, respectively. However, the original focus on protection and vulnerability encouraged many migrants’ rights advocates in the hope that the GCM would take a rights-based approach to migration governance.

Preparations moved quickly, first for the Summit itself and then for the 2-year GCR and GCM processes it launched. By early 2017, UN Member States agreed to the modalities of the process, which included a consultations phase, a stocktaking phase, and a negotiations phase, all part of an explicitly intergovernmental process. Nevertheless, the compact process enabled and even facilitated a certain level of civil society and other stakeholder participation and access. Consequently, the civil society organizations and networks best placed to participate were those already involved in the GFMD and HLD processes, given their existing relationships to one another and to UN agencies and the GFMD. Through a combination of self-selection and network-based recruitment, they were central to the official UN-organized stakeholder participation as well as a parallel effort at ‘self-organized’ civil society coordination, coordinated by an Action Committee led by the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) together with International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) and the NGO Committee on Migration, and comprising about 20 members. The lack of funding available for civil society participation in the Summit further limited participation almost entirely to those with access to New York.

Following the Summit, advocacy initially aimed at getting stronger commitments on issues where the NYD itself fell short of the standards set by existing international human rights instruments – for instance, on the issue of ending detention of migrant children. Advocacy also focused heavily on the need for states to move beyond general commitments to human rights and to deliver in specific, operationalizable terms on issues such as ending detention (especially of children), not criminalizing irregular migrants, protecting labor rights, and ensuring protection of human rights of migrants in vulnerable situations including at borders.

Beginning in the consultation phase and continuing through the negotiation phase, there were concerted efforts among advocacy networks to bring regionally embedded members with regional- and national-level expertise into the process, and to strengthen connections between national/regional and global policy spaces. The IOM supported regional civil society consultations in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Africa, the United States–Canada, Europe, Latin America and Caribbean, and Pacific regions, anchored by regional organizations already connected to the global policy space, but including broader participation. These consultations were intended to feed regional civil society perspectives into the stocktaking conference.

Equally importantly, the regional civil society reports facilitated vastly improved cross-regional understanding of the distinct regional perspectives and dynamics. As the process moved from consultations and stocktaking to the production of a text for negotiations, civil society advice to, and advocacy with, government officials both in capitals and in New York gained importance. In New York, civil society organizations were increasingly able to coordinate among themselves on effective approaches to allied, ‘like-minded’ states within and across regions.

The final GCM text was weaker overall on migrants’ rights protections than the initial draft, though not in all respects. It can be read as breaking new ground on protecting the human and labor rights of migrants, or as derogating dangerously from existing standards in international human rights and labor law. A widely supported civil society statement issued the day the text was gaveled presents the most optimistic reading its drafters could muster. However, labor organizations are conspicuously missing from the endorsements. Perspectives on the document also vary according to expectations about what comes next: What can be achieved through the implementation architecture and mechanisms – including the formation of a new UN Migration Network in the context of the wider restructuring of the UN Development System?

Reflections on the path ahead

The 2016 Summit, and especially the 2-year GCM process that followed, presented migrants’ rights advocates with both opportunities and challenges. Advocates had spent years – in some cases more than two decades – frustrated by the failure of the CMW to attract sufficient support to be effective. For almost that long, many of them had worked assiduously to increase and defend civil society space and voice in global arenas such as the GFMD, while also deepening their participation in regional mechanisms and/or with national governments. The GCM seemed to many to offer a new opportunity for the international community to address migration governance more comprehensively and to do so within a UN context that would support a human rights–based approach; others were not so optimistic.

A recurring challenge was the pressure from some quarters of civil society as well as from states to speak with a unified voice, to align around compromise framings of issues that some organizations and their constituencies found difficult to reconcile with core positions. Often, this was in part a strategic question about how to respond when abstract and general commitments to ‘fully protect the human rights of all . . . migrants, regardless of status’ (NYD, para. 5) were accompanied in the text by specific provisions that fell below international human rights standards. Already a problem in the NYD around issues like child detention, the situation became much more acute with the GCM itself because, unlike the NYD, the GCM was supposed to provide agreement and a blueprint to operationalize specific commitments. Instead, as the political climate deteriorated and many states hardened their positions, civil society relied increasingly on referencing even the vague NYD commitments rather than allowing the GCM’s ‘cooperative framework’ to fall below these even if it still acknowledged, using weaker terms than the NYD,

shared responsibilities to one another as Member States of the United Nations to address each other’s needs and concerns over migration, and an overarching obligation to respect, protect and fulfill the human rights of all migrants, regardless of their migration status, while promoting the security and prosperity of all our communities.

Now that the compact has been completed, many if not most organizations intend to continue some level of involvement into the next phase, as countries, regional bodies, and the UN system move to implement the GCM’s commitments and actions at national (and sub-national), bilateral, regional, and global levels. This means that the civil society organizations involved in the process will have to take the Compact ‘back home’ and convince their respective constituencies that it can be a useful resource to support their long-standing advocacy agendas with governments and other duty bearers. Depending on how such efforts are received at the grassroots level, including by migrants themselves, as well as on how seriously specific governments take their commitments to implementing the GCM, further civil society engagement is likely to take a wide range of forms, from practical cooperation on implementing particular provisions, to campaigns criticizing non-compliance, to more fundamental critiques of the new framework itself.