François Crépeau, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, gave a talk on Feb. 1, hosted by the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. The talk, entitled “Inception of a Global Migration Management Regime,” focused on some of the problems facing international migrants, and on what is being done to change the systems that create these issues.
Crépeau is the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer professor in public international law at McGill’s faculty of law. His role at the UN involves investigating migrants’ rights and situations in various countries, drafting reports to the UN Human Rights Council, and recommending actions to resolve migrants’ rights issues.
“I’m less interested in permanent residents, in migrants who come with money or skills or who will become citizens very quickly. I’m more interested in vulnerable, irregular migrants,” Crépeau said.
Global migrants, particularly temporary migrant workers, are frequently denied basic human rights, but most governments are unwilling to discuss the issue on an international level.
“The hidden discourse is that migrants in irregular situations do not have rights,” Crépeau said.
According to Crépeau, there is less public awareness of the challenges faced by migrants than there is of many other current human rights issues. This is in part a result of politicians’ reluctance to discuss the issue.
“On the subject of immigration, politicians can say whatever they want, without consequence, because vulnerable, temporary, and irregular immigrants cannot vote … they are politically insignificant,” Crépeau said. “Because [migrants] are afraid of being deported, they do not complain either.”
Another factor contributing to the lack of awareness about these issues is their portrayal in the media.
“The media seeks short phrases, and on the subject of immigration that generally means [something like] ‘there are too many immigrants.’ That is a short phrase,” Crépeau said. “The role of the Special Rapporteur is to change the discourse, to change the vocabulary; to introduce complexity into the discussion of migrants, and to get away from a simplistic discourse.”
Crépeau noted that for more effective dialogue, people need to change the way they think about migration.
“I think the conceptual change that we have to do, like we did for women, for aboriginals, for detainees, and for gays and lesbians, is to go from an “us and them” discourse to an “I and we” discourse. That is what the human rights movement does,” Crépeau said.
A small group attended Crépeau’s talk, including students, fellow professors, and a representative from the Philippine Embassy in Ottawa, all of whom stayed past the official conclusion of the speech to ask further questions, and to continue the discussion.
Students expressed their appreciation for Crépeau’s extensive knowledge on the subject of migrants’ rights.
“I wanted to see the talk to learn a little bit more about the notion of a global migration management regime,” Bethany Hastie, a doctoral student in the faculty of law with the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, said.
“There are many events [like this one] within the law faculty that have the potential to interest people who are not in law,” Ludovic Langlois-Thérien, U4 law, said. “I think there should be a way for people who are not within this faculty to know about these events.”
Throughout his talk, Crépeau emphasized the humanity of migrants around the world.
“We are all migrants,” he said. “The human condition involves mobility, and it is not migration that is the exception, it is sedentariness. That is an important thing we seem to have forgotten.”
