Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All

Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families

Thirty-ninth session

Summary record ( p artial )* of th e 590th meeting**

Held at the Palais Wilson, Geneva, on Friday, 13 December 2024, at 3 p.m.

Chair:Ms. Diallo

Contents

Organizational matters

Closure of the session

The discussion covered in the summary record began at 5.40 p.m.

Organizational matters

The Chair said that she wished to commend the Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for having worked during the intersessional period to complete the second phase of regional consultations for their joint general comment 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. Following the thirty-eighth session, in fact, the two Committees, in cooperation with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the International Organization for Migration, had held meetings with experts from government, academia and civil society from across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Then, during the course of the thirty-ninth session, the two Committees had met in plenary session to continue work on the joint general comment.

On 18 December 2023, International Migrants Day, the Committee had published a declaration calling upon States to combat climate change and environmental degradation, which often constituted the driving factors behind migration. In particular, the declaration had invited States to provide complementary protection and temporary residence to migrant workers who had been displaced by climate change and were unable to return to their countries of origin. The Committee had also encouraged other treaty bodies to continue to focus on the effect that climate change and climate catastrophes had on the rights protected under their respective instruments.

In addition to a long-standing lack of resources, the treaty body system was also being affected by the liquidity crisis that was currently afflicting the United Nations. Those factors prevented the treaty bodies from carrying out their mandated activities effectively and efficiently, and limited the human rights protection they could offer. Nonetheless, and despite those constraints, the treaty body strengthening process had achieved significant results. For their part, the Chairs of the human rights treaty bodies had submitted proposals to make the system more coherent and sustainable and to harmonize working methods across all the committees, notably by exhorting States to approve an eight-year review cycle. In the Pact for the Future, adopted by the General Assembly in September 2024, the Member States of the United Nations had called upon the Secretary General to evaluate the need for adequate, predictable and sustained financing for United Nations human rights mechanisms. Regrettably, however, the Pact had taken no account of the Chairs’ proposals.

Turning to the activities undertaken during the thirty-ninth session, she noted that the Committee had formally adopted its general comment No. 6 on the convergence of the Convention and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. In the document – which was due to be made public at an official ceremony to be held in April 2025 – the Committee expressed its concern that the approach to irregular migration was increasingly focused on security and that the measures taken to prevent irregular migrants from crossing national frontiers went beyond mere governance and were contributing to mounting intolerance and xenophobia. The general comment likewise called upon States to ensure that their laws, policies and practices addressed the root causes of the increased migratory flows.

The Committee had held interactive in-person dialogues with delegations from Benin, Egypt, Peru and Seychelles, and it had adopted concluding observations on the reports of all four States parties. It had also adopted a list of issues under the traditional procedure for Mauritania, as well as lists of issues prior to reporting under the simplified procedure for Indonesia, Mali and Timor-Leste. The Committee had also examined the follow-up report from Azerbaijan concerning the priority recommendations contained in the concluding observations on the country’s third periodic report.

For the first time in its history, the Committee had held a private meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr. Volker Türk. During the meeting, members had been able to brief the High Commissioner on, inter alia, the ratification status of the Convention, the general comment No. 6 and the joint general comment with the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the challenges the Committee was facing and the contribution it was making to the process of harmonizing working methods. To follow up on that meeting, she had then met in her capacity as Chair of the Committee with the Director of the Human Rights Council and Treaties Division to whom she had explained the Committee’s concerns regarding the severity of the liquidity crisis and the human and logistical resources it needed to fulfil its mandate

Closure of the session

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

The meeting rose at 6 p.m.