Latin America Calls for Free Movement of Persons in Global Compact on Migration Orlando Milesi - Inter Press Service
go to original September 4, 2017

UN High Commissioner Filippo Grandi met last month with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to discuss Mexico’s role in addressing the migration and refugee crisis in the region, and to call for strengthening of protection measures for those seeking asylum here. (UNHCR)

Latin America and the Caribbean called for the free movement of persons to be included in the Global Compact on Migration, which will be negotiated within the United Nations in 2018, in the first meeting held by any of the world’s regions to decide on the position to be adopted on the future agreement.

Nearly a hundred experts on migration from the region took part in the meeting, held at Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) headquarters in Santiago on Aug. 30-31, which brought together representatives of governments, international bodies, civil society and academia.

Louise Arbour, U.N. Special Representative for International Migration, who is to draft the “zero draft” of the Compact before the end of the year, told IPS that “this is the first regional meeting and it gives us a great deal of information about what is happening today with people. It confirms many ideas, such as what is going on with irregular migration and people’s rights.”

Earlier, during the closure of the meeting, Arbour said that up to now “the movement of migrants, women and children has been poorly managed. They first talked about illegal immigrants, and pejoratively of economic immigrants.”

“Xenophobia is an expression of anger and lack of trust in governments,” she said.

“The goal is to facilitate regulated migration. It’s not on our agenda to stop the movement of people,” she said in reference to the Global Compact on Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration which is in moving forward within the U.N.

Arbour anticipated that the Draft will be “rooted in a development agenda” and will be aimed at “a people-centred, forward-looking pact that is realistically ambitious.”

For her part, ECLAC executive secretary Alicia Bárcena considered it imperative that “equality be at the core of the Compact, although perhaps we better first start with equity.”

“The DNA of the Compact is cooperation,” she said, adding that with this agreement “migration ceases to be about security and human rights, and becomes a development issue, in a strategic matter of global governance.”

Read the rest at Inter Press Service

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