From Complementarity to Convergence: the UN Global Compact for Migration and the UN Migrant Workers Convention

The UN Global Compact for Migration (GCM) was adopted amidst much fanfare in 2018 and heralded as the first-ever UN global agreement on a common approach to international migration in all its dimensions. This claim is questionable, given the adoption in 1990 of the UN International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICRMW), a core international human rights instrument and the most comprehensive international treaty in the field of migration and human rights. The near-complete silence on the ICRMW during negotiation and adoption of the Global Compact is a cause for concern from the perspective of migrants’ rights protection. The GCM is a soft-law document, a non-legally binding agreement that articulates standards for the treatment of migration and migrants’ rights that fall short of the requirements contained in the ICRMW. In this article I compare the GCM, which may be viewed as an instrument calibrated to the advantage of the Global North, with the ICRMW, which I suggest may be viewed as a de facto instrument of the Global South. After highlighting the large degree of overlap and concordance between the two instruments (B.), I provide an overview of the risks of rights dilution that the GCM poses for migrants’ rights (C.), and then explore the possibilities for ensuring that states implement the Compact in a way that avoids divergence with ICRMW standards (D.). Finally (E.), I identify the key role of the Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW), the body of independent experts charged with supervising application of the ICRMW, in translating the complementarity between the two documents into convergence in implementation. I illustrate how energetic efforts on the part of the CMW on specific fronts may work to effectively ameliorate the risks of rights dilution contained in the GCM and its implementation process.