GENEVA, 26 September 2013 (ICMC) -- Having worked the past six months as coordinator of civil society in the United Nations’ High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development<, ICMC next week will join hundreds of peers in talks with governments to better integrate migration into the post-2015 development agenda, promote the rights of migrants and labour mobility, and build partnerships to sustain this change.

Seven years after the first HLD on Migration and Development, this meeting held during the General Assembly’s sixty-eighth session from 3 to 4 October will allow ministerial and other high-level state, intergovernmental-organization and civil-society representatives to take stock of problems and progress in migration policies worldwide and to outline issues that require new research or policies.

Some 232 million people – 3.2 per cent of the world’s population – are international migrants, according to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs<. Global remittances sent home by migrants, including those to high-income countries, totaled $529 billion in 2012, the World Bank< estimated. Of these, some $401 billion flowed back into developing countries. This is more than three times the total amount of official development assistance that governments extend to developing countries.

Yet many of these migrants regularly see their basic human rights violated — many millions grievously. One of the HLD’s objectives – pursued on a daily basis by ICMC and other civil society organizations working in the field and in advocacy worldwide – is to systematically factor human rights into the migration debate and to make migration a greater gain than drain for all countries of origin and destination.

This is achieved by defining measures that ensure respect for and protection of the human rights of all migrants, not only by ensuring the enforcement of international standards, but also by engaging diaspora and migrant groups in the setting of these priorities to aid their effective implementation.

At the Global Forum on Migration and Development<, held in Mauritius in November 2012, and at the World Social Forum on Migration in Manila a week later, hundreds of civil-society leaders and networks from around the world developed a proposal for the HLD of collaborating with governments on a concrete five-year, eight-point plan< covering key issues at the intersection of migration and development and calling for all parties’ urgent commitment.

Many of the issues at stake have been the subject of concrete – and frequently quite similar – recommendations by States and civil society at the meetings of the GFMD in recent years. The four roundtables that the Governments are organizing for the HLD debates during the upcoming UN General Assembly cover all of the issues from civil society’s proposed plan:

• Development (roundtable 1):

• How to integrate migration into the post-2015 development agenda to capitalize not only on the contributions that migrants make to development, but also promote better policy planning/coherence, generating human-development (and not just economic) gains.
• How to engage more diaspora and migrant associations as entrepreneurs, social investors, policy advocates and partners in setting and achieving priorities for full human development in countries of origin, heritage and destination.

• The rights of migrants (roundtable 2):

• How to address the assistance and protection needs of migrants stranded in distress, beginning with those trapped in situations of conflict and natural or man-made disaster but with the same respect for human rights as applied to other victims of violence or trauma in transit.
• How to address the needs, and better protect the rights and best interests of, women and children in the context of migration.

• Partnerships (roundtable 3):

• How to promote  the exchange of good practice and enactment and implementation of national legislation to comply with international conventions that pertain to migrants of all kinds.
• How can international governance mechanisms and the UN normative framework (and civil society within it) better protect migrants’ rights?

• Labour mobility (roundtable 4):

• Which standards and mechanisms can better regulate the migrant labour recruitment industry?
• Which mechanisms can guarantee labour rights for migrant workers?

To ensure that discussions to improve the governance of migration turn into concrete actions, civil society has tried to seek real-time collaboration with governments, setting benchmarks< to measure progress and formulating clear expectations.

“Civil society’s five-year plan does not call for a new UN institution, or a new process,” said John K. Bingham, ICMC’s Head of Policy, in charge of HLD and GFMD civil society coordination. “We don’t necessarily expect full consensus – but a strong convergence from States, matching a strong convergence from civil society for action on these eight issues.”

Civil society has relentlessly prepared its contribution to the upcoming HLD over the course of the year.

At the request of peer organizations and invitation of the Office of the President of the UN General Assembly, ICMC coordinated global civil society activities of the HLD, including two days of preparation with 300 civil-society leaders ahead of the July 15 “interactive hearings<” held at the UN General Assembly in New York in July – their official input to government deliberations at the HLD during which they asked States to endorse this five-year approach of collaboration.

What is more, to prepare those discussions surrounding the eight points, some 600 civil society representatives met in 21 other regional and national events organized between January and June this year.

-- by Lori Brumat

Photocredit © Texty.nl / July 2013

For more information on civil society participation in the HLD, please visit http://hldcivilsociety.org<.