20th Anniversary Conference of the Mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants
Mexico City, 12-13 November 2019
On 12-13 November, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (SRHRM) held an event in Mexico City (at the Universidad Iberoamericana), commemorating the mandate’s 20 years of work protecting the human rights of migrants. The event provided a space for the current Special Rapporteur, together with relevant stakeholders, and his predecessors, to reflect on the impact and achievements of the mandate at national, regional, and international levels. It was also an opportunity to reflect further on the challenges facing the human rights of migrants today and to explore thematic priorities for the future work of the mandate.
The conference included a presentation by the GDP’s Executive Director Michael Flynn, as part of a panel discussing how we can best build a rights-based approach to migration governance. Speaking alongside Karim Ghezraoui (OHCHR), Jessica Lopez Mejia (Policy Migration Unit at the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico), Jamil Dakwar (American Civil Liberties Union), Misun Woo (Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development), and José Antonio Guevara (Working Group on Arbitrary Detention), his presentation, entitled “Protecting the Rights of Refugees and Migrants Deprived of their Liberty: Challenges and Opportunities,” examined the growth of detention regimes in countries that have ratified the Convention on Migrant Workers—many of which have been subjected to intense pressure from neighbours to block the movement of third-country nationals.
