Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All

Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families

Thirty-eighth session

Summary record ( p artial )* of th e 570th meeting**

Held at the Palais Wilson, Geneva, on Friday, 14 June 2024, at 3 p.m.

Chair:Ms. Diallo

Contents

Organizational matters

Closure of the session

The discussion covered in the summary record began at 5.30 p.m.

Organizational matters

The Chair said that the Committee was concerned by certain global tendencies affecting the human rights of migrants and members of their families who often faced conditions that remained far distant from the ideals enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had marked its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2023. Currently, 281 million people lived and worked in a country that was not their own, and human mobility was a growing and increasingly complex phenomenon as nations across the world were becoming more culturally diverse. Yet, the issue of migration tended to be approached exclusively from a perspective of economic development, security or border control, while growing xenophobia in many regions saw migrants as an easy target to which to attribute a country’s socioeconomic woes.

Migration was often the symptom and the effect of profound socioeconomic or environmental changes. Migrants’ vulnerability might be due to specific factors or to a combination thereof such as, inter alia, their age, sex, gender identity, ethnic or national origin, disability or the circumstances that had obliged them to leave their country of origin. Migrants, particularly those in an irregular situation, were disproportionately exposed to abuse and the violation of their fundamental rights. They remained outside juridical frameworks and therefore required specific action for the protection of those rights. Frequently, they lacked access to due procedure or means of redress. At the same time, openings for regular migration were being restricted, border controls were becoming more stringent, migration journeys were becoming more dangerous and many migrants continued to die or disappear along migration routes.

The Committee was particularly concerned at the increasing incidence of enforced disappearance in the context of international migration and called upon States and other stakeholders to cooperate more closely with a view to resolving that issue, in accordance with objective 8 of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. She encouraged States that had not already done so to ratify the Convention which, it was important to note, did not create new rights but took up rights already enshrined in existing international human rights instruments and applied them to an immense specific category of the global population: migrants and members of their families.

Turning to the activities undertaken during the thirty-eighth session, she said that the Committee had held interactive in-person dialogues with delegations from Türkiye, Senegal and the Congo, and it had adopted concluding observations on the reports of all three States parties. It had also adopted lists of issues under the traditional procedure for Egypt and Honduras, as well as a list of issues prior to reporting under the simplified procedure for Ghana.

A new Bureau had been elected by consensus and, for the first time, a woman had been selected as Chair of the Committee. At the invitation of the human rights team of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the new Bureau had visited IPU headquarters, and a new plan of action for collaboration with IPU was expected to be submitted shortly for the Committee’s approval. Moreover, the Committee had held informal meetings with the outgoing Chief of the Human Rights Treaties Branch of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), with the secretary for the chairpersons of the human rights treaty bodies, with the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants and with the OHCHR Migration Unit coordinator.

Mr. Ceriani Cernadas had briefed the Committee on a proposed joint general comment with the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination regarding the “obligations of State Parties on public policies for addressing and eradicating xenophobia and its impact on the rights of migrants, their families, and other non-citizens affected by racial discrimination”. During the session, moreover, the Committee had dedicated three meetings to draft general comment No. 6. Consultations on the document would continue during the intersessional period and agreement had been reached on a working plan to finalize and adopt the comment during the forthcoming thirty-ninth session. A tentative list of States parties to be reviewed during the Committee’s thirty-ninth and fortieth sessions had been drawn up, and the country rapporteurs had been identified.

More generally, the Committee had continued to enhance its partnerships with representatives of civil society organizations, national human rights institutions, the International Labour Organization, the International Organization for Migration, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UN-Women, IPU and the OHCHR Migration Unit.

Closure of the session

The Chair, following the customary exchange of courtesies, declared the thirty-eighth session of the Committee on Migrant Workers closed.

The meeting rose at 5.50 p.m.