Moving beyond refugees and migrants: reconceptualising the rights of people on the move

Abstract

The two Global Compacts on Migration and on Refugees, adopted in December 2018, reflect public and policy discourse and international legal norms in differentiating between “refugees” and “migrants”. Yet, in a context of mixed migration flows, where migrants and refugees move along the same routes and are, for all but legal purposes, indistinguishable, it can be questioned to what extent distinctions in law are adequate. This essay challenges the dichotomy between “refugees” and “migrants” and instead refers to “people on the move” as an overarching category including a wider range of human mobility for whom there needs to be a basic standard of protection. More specifically, the essay argues we should broaden our analysis to include the rights of people on the move. We thus make an attempt at conceptualizing and delineating the rights of people on the move, anchored in a human rights approach, and pay particular attention to those rights that are the most relevant, namely their mobility rights, safety and dignity rights, and legal protection rights.

Keywords:

• Global Compact for Migration
• Global Compact on Refugees
• human rights
• mixed migration
• people on the move

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Christina Oelgemöller, Sarah Elliott and the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed review and recommendations. Any remaining mistakes are our own.

Notes

1 A person is a refugee as soon as she meets the requirements in the refugee definition, and the refugee status determination procedure serves only to recognise this status.

2 Further guidance on the rights of vulnerable people on the move can be found in documents which elaborate on the rights of (vulnerable) migrants, such as OHCHR (2017) and in scholarly literature (Atak et al. 2018; Guild, Grant, and Groenendijk 2018).

3 We do not include the Migrant Workers Convention and the ILO conventions on labour migration because of their limited ratification.

4 As the right to seek and/or receive asylum is not mentioned in the ICCPR, it is not discussed here. However, to the extent that such a right exists, it can be conceived as a safety right.