UN universal periodic review: What is Argentina’s human rights situation?

Argentina will be reviewed in the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday, January 23. It will have to report to its peers on compliance with its international commitments on human rights matters. CELS, along with other organizations, produced reports as prior contributions for the assessment and recommendations to be produced by this mechanism. We will also be present at the session in Geneva.

  

End of a policy that never should have existed

We applaud the Executive Branch’s decision to repeal DNU 70/2017, the implementation of which posed a clear setback for migrant rights in the country over the past four years. The annulment of this decree is a fundamental step towards equality, the right to migrate and towards the recognition of the State’s obligation to regulate migration.

  

The Global Compact for Migration was adopted

More than 160 UN member countries endorsed the Global Compact for Migration at an intergovernmental conference held on December 10-11. This agreement includes some important advances, above all in a context of growing xenophobia and nationalism in Latin America and the world.

  

Treating migration as a security problem violates human rights

During the final round of negotiations on the Global Compact for Migration, 40 organizations urged UN member states to ensure that the accord fully incorporate a rights-based approach. The last draft includes changes that reinforce a focus on control and security. If this is validated, countries will have wasted a historic opportunity to fuel a paradigm shift.

  

A Global Compact to return migrants?

The latest draft of the Global Compact for Migration avoids mentioning the regularization of those who are already living in their destination country, which is a serious omission. Opinion piece by Camila Barretto Maia, Diego Morales y Raísa Ortiz Cetra.

  

“Migration policies achieve the opposite of what official discourse claims to seek”

In 2016, more than 5,000 migrants died in the Mediterranean. Many were attempting to reach the southern border of Spain, where deaths, disappearances and people wandering in search of their family members are a daily scene. Carlos Arce Jiménez, in Argentina under an agreement between the University of Córdoba (Spain), the University of Lanús’s Institute of Justice and Human Rights and CELS, talked to us about the responsibility of migration and border policies in this crisis.