François Crépeau: A Q&A with the UN special rapporteur on migrants rights

François Crépeau, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, spoke to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday after a weeklong series of discussions on migrant rights at UN headquarters.

Thursday saw the launch of the Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights at International Borders – a hefty document intended to provide governments with guidelines on developing practices that ensure the protection of human rights at borders while taking into account state governance and sovereignty concerns.

On Wednesday, Crépeau spent the day speaking with students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

His message seems simple enough: Don’t violate the basic human rights of migrants and asylum seekers. But in a world ruled by the politics of immigration, economy and national security, such lofty ideals can fall by the wayside.

More people have been deported under President Barack Obama than any other U.S. president. And having an open immigration policy is a tough battle, especially during an election year.

The Ebola crisis, meanwhile, has seen many countries call for sealing borders and blocking all flights from affected African countries.

Crépeau sat down for a brief interview with Al Jazeera to explain why it’s in the best interest of governments to embrace these guidelines and to stop separating migrant rights from human rights.

In the U.S. and some European countries, calling for more open borders, increasing the number of migrant workers and accepting more asylum seekers is a losing game for politicians. How do you turn that around?

Crépeau: The problem we have with migrants is that they don’t have access to the political stage. They’re not a constituency. They don’t vote. They don’t get elected. Politicians don’t make promises to them – even promises than they can break…they are non-existent. Politically, they are taxed, very often even if they have a precarious status, but not represented.

Most of what is said at the highly politicized level, by politicians, in front of cameras, during election season, is based on fantasy. It’s based on risks and threats that are totally unproven, undocumented or which is contrary to what social science is saying.

So the fact that migrants lower wages, the fact that migrants take jobs from citizens, the fact that migrants constitute security risks, the fact that migrants can be terrorists – all this is contrary to what social science has been saying for thirty years. And yet, it is carried forward by politicians all the time because we’re in a political debate where these stereotypes go uncontradicted, precisely because no political party will take up the cause of migrants. And if it’s uncontradicted, it’s real, it’s reproduced by popular media and people believe it because it is said again, again, and again.

You’ve spoken openly about equating citizenship rights with human rights, meaning that one can bolster one’s rights based on nationality. Are you suggesting that human rights supersede any right granted by statehood?

Crépeau: In international human rights law, all human beings have all human rights, wherever they are, except two: The right to vote and be elected, and the right to enter and stay in a country. Only citizens have those rights.

All other rights are for everyone. Now, that doesn’t mean because you have the same fundamental rights as others within the country that you are entitled to the same government services – there are criteria for government services. But we certainly all have the same human rights: We have the right health, the right to an education, the right to not be tortured, the right to due process.

All this, we have because we are human beings, not because we are citizens or have some special entitlement.

Why is it in the best interest of states to employ the recommendations laid out in the guidelines?

Crépeau: Because these guidelines have been developed, starting with the human rights principles that most states have adhered to. And if they have not ratified a convention, they still consider that most of those conventions already exist in their laws and should be applicable. And in many cases, a country like the United States, and many other countries, go well beyond the minimal guarantee of a given convention.

But there are no consequences to violating these conventions, are there?

Crépeau: We are in an international law system which is not like the law systems that we live with in our countries. We don’t have that international law, there is no international police. There is a very rudimentary international judiciary for interstate complaints and, in certain cases, of international criminal cases. So implementation of international law is left mostly to the goodwill of states…these are the mechanisms we have, because they are the only mechanisms that the states have agreed to subject themselves to. We are with a very defective international law system, but we have to accept that this is the best we’ve ever invented.

So it’s not that bad, but it should be better.

How can governments guarantee border security while avoiding tragedies like the ones we’ve been seeing in the Mediterranean, in which thousands die at sea in a bid to reach the closest European shore?

Crépeau: Syrians, for example – they try to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. I think 3 million of them are out of the country…many more are coming out, week after week. If European states believe that doing nothing is going allow the problem to go away, they are badly mistaken – and yet, they’re not doing anything, really. They should be doing a huge resettlement program that would allow to disgorge the refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and would cut the business model of the smugglers. And since these people are coming anyway, how can we decide that these people come under our decision and not the smugglers’ decision? The only way to do it is to not seal the border – that will create markets for mafias.

That was the case during prohibition, it’s case for the war on drugs. So migrants are coming, whether we like it or not. We will not seal the borders because we are democracies and because sealing the borders means shooting on sight and we’re not going to do that. Hopefully.