From Enforced Closure to Regulated Mobility: The Need for a Paradigm Shift in Migration Policies

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.