Abstract
Editor’s note: the following text is an edited version of the keynote address delivered on May 13, 2015, at the 8th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS) at Ryerson University, Toronto. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank the organisers, and in particular my colleague and friend Prof. Idil Atak, for inviting me to this exchange with you. It is a rare occasion and I’m very grateful for the opportunity. I was asked to share with you a number of ideas coming from my experience as UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, especially on the relationship between criminalisation, precariousness, and human rights protection. The thoughts I’m sharing with you are mostly based on my knowledge of international human rights and refugee law, my country visits – Albania, Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Greece, the European Union (Brussels), Qatar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Malta – and my various thematic reports on the detention of migrants, climate change and migration, the management of the external borders of the European Union, Global Migration Governance, the labour exploitation of migrants, and the human rights of migrants in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. They are also inspired by the most recent policy announcements made by the European Union, including the European Migration Agenda announced today in Brussels.
Highlights
SERIES EDITOR Harald Bauder Ryerson Centre for Immigration & Settlement Ryerson University Jorgenson Hall, 620 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON M5B2K3 http://www.ryerson.ca/rcis
RCIS Working Papers present scholarly research of all disciplines on issues related to immigration and settlement
The views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of RCIS
Summary
The criminalisation of irregular migration is in the discourse and in the practice, more than in the law proper. Immigration regulations, proceedings, and policies "mimic" the criminal justice system in many ways, including the importation of criminal categories, criminal law enforcement mechanisms (immigration enforcement officers and border guards are almost equivalent to police officers, sometimes to military personnel, in their powers to arrest and detain, or to gather intelligence, and they often request the collaboration of other agencies to help them in they work), institutions of criminal punishment (many immigration detention centres around the world are prison-like), and crime control rationales (the public debate is often full of references to the criminality of “illegal aliens”) These shifts have not been accompanied by increased legal safeguards of the kind found in criminal law. My colleague and friend Audrey Macklin, who was an IRB member for a time, said, rolling her eyes, “It’s an impossible task!” The difficulty in appreciating the evidence provided, coupled with the potential consequences of a wrong decision, place a heavy burden upon the shoulders of decision makers
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