Blog post written by Katharine T. Weatherhead, a Refugee Law Initiative Research Affiliate undertaking a PhD in Law at Queen Mary University of London. Katharine’s research is primarily focused on the law and politics of asylum in the EU. The working title of her doctoral thesis is ‘Unravelling Mediterranean Migration: Legal and political knowledge creation and diffusion among asylum seekers, refugees and migrants’. This blog forms part of a series of blog posts analysing the final draft (objective by objective) of the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.
What began as a modest topic in the UN General Assembly’s New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants is now a fully-fledged objective in the intergovernmentally negotiated Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). In the New York Declaration of 19 September 2016, States commit to ‘take measures to inform migrants about the various processes relating to their arrival and stay in countries of transit, destination and return’ (A/RES/71/1, para 42). Objective 3 of the Final Draft of the GCM, dated 11 July 2018, pushes the New York Declaration forward. In Objective 3 (para 19), States commit to strengthening their efforts to provide information ‘for and between States, communities and migrants at all stages of migration’.
Broad in content, the information is to cover ‘migration-related aspects’ and it is to be ‘accurate, timely, accessible and transparent’. An additional strand of commitment is that States ‘use this information to develop migration policies that provide a high degree of predictability and certainty for all actors involved’.
In her blog post, Katharine highlights a few of the changes that States made to the text of Objective 3 before it reached the Final Draft. She goes on to consider the promise that the Objective holds for the future, as well as some challenges that might impact the realisation of its potential.
Full blog post here
Acknowledgements:Logo: ©GCMigration