The Executive Board’s Committee on International
Non-Governmental Organizations held four meetings on 5 and 6
May 2011
to examine the “Relations with International Non-Governmental Organizations,
Foundations and Similar Institutions”.

The meetings were attended by 23 States Members of the
Committee and 70 international non-governmental organizations. In his statement, Mr
Eric Falt, Assistant Director-General for External Relations and Public
Information and representative of the Director-General on the Committee,
stressed that the theme chosen for the Round Table was a particularly topical
issue and called for reflection about migration, the situation of migrants and
UNESCO’s scope for action in that field, in cooperation with its
non-governmental partners, in the endeavour to provide solutions to the various
stakeholders.

Round Table: “Social and Human Impact of International
Migrations”

Morning session: Political, economic and
environmental aspects

The first subtheme is introduced by Mr Suwit Khunkitti, Minister of
Natural Resources and Environment of Thailand, who shares his views and
experiences about migration in today’s society. He began by stating that the recent advancement of
technology and transportation together with economic and social disparities and
the global environmental change drive millions to migrate, sometimes in forced
and exploited conditions. Migration management is therefore one of the top
priorities on the political agenda of many countries. He analyses that
migration in today’s society has two divided aspects: transnational and local.

Mr Raul Delgado Wise, Director of the Doctoral Studies
Programme in Development at the Autonomous
University of Za Catecas in Mexico, gave a ‘Southern’ and more
critical perspective on the relationship between development and migration
taking into consideration contemporary capitalism. Mr Delgado Wise underlined
the root causes fundamental to the exodus of millions of poor workers forced to
struggle for their survival in developed nations.

After the presentations by the panellists, the two UNESCO
regional bureaux which had followed the debates by videoconference gave the floor to the NGOs
invited to take part. The Bangkok
Bureau went first, with the NGO Fight
Against Child Exploitation (FACE).  Its representative, Ms Khun Sudarat, presented
her NGO’s work in the field of human trafficking and legal aid. It was
positioned in relation to migration that went wrong, trafficking and forced
labour, in particular in the sex industry. The main problem was that very few
victims recognized themselves as subject to such abuses.

The two NGOs
invited by the Beirut Office, KAFA – Enough violence and exploitation and Caritas Lebanon Migrant Centre, presented their activities. KAFA
worked mainly to stop violence against women and domestic workers who were
excluded from labour law. Caritas Lebanon strived to provide protection to
vulnerable persons and had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the
Government to protect the victims of trafficking. The needs of migrants had to
be taken into account and the fight against exploitation had to put a special
emphasis on female migrant workers.

Afternoon session : Human rights and human trafficking

 Mr Richard Danziger, Chief of Mission
for Sri Lanka, International Organization for Migration (IOM), expressed concern that the United
Nations had not done much for victims of human trafficking and migration in
recent years. Perhaps there was a lack of clarity to those classified as victims of trafficking. The number of migrants worldwide increased every year
and currently is at 200 million.

Migrant workers according to R. Danziger
occupied hundreds of thousands of jobs in the host countries. He added that
governments had a tendency to offer securitization and tighten visas and
immigration regimes. Nevertheless, there was a growing market and increasing
opportunities for human traffickers, and inevitably with that, migrant labour
was exploited. Trafficking of human beings was an illicit trade, just like the
illegal trafficking of drugs, and that generated social, environmental and
political harm in the receiving country.

As a result, fragile states were more likely to collapse
as managing migration posed challenges for such countries. Unfortunately,
economic disparities could not be avoided, but migration existed to meet the
laws of supply and demand in the modern, globalized and capitalist world.

Mr Julien Frey, Migration and Asylum Unit,
Europe Aid Development and Cooperation Directorate-General of the European Commission, placed in context
the gradual inclusion since 1997 of immigration matters in Community policies
and texts. The global approach of the European Commission was three-pronged:
reducing unauthorized immigration, increasing legal immigration, and improving
the link between migration and development. The issue of human trafficking was
dealt with as much in a human rights perspective as in one of combating
unauthorized immigration.

The European strategy in those fields involved the
adoption of standard-setting instruments and the introduction of policy and
external cooperation instruments. On the whole, the issue of human trafficking
was linked to the issue of policies to combat international crime in addition
to policies on migration.

Ms Bridget Wooding, Associate Researcher,
Coordinator of the Programme Observatory of Caribbean Migrants, Facultad Latino-Americana de Ciencias
Sociales (FLACSO) in the Dominican Republic, spoke of the challenges for
the mobility of Haitian women to the Dominican Republic following the
earthquake that shook Haiti in 2010.She introduced the concept of "feminization of migrations", in which women chose to migrate on their own rather than
migrate as victims of human trafficking. Forced migration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic was not a new phenomenon.
Migrating women from Haiti had a weak idea of what their
rights were, including the right to dignity of their body. Human trafficking
and illicit smuggling of persons from Haiti to the Dominican Republic remained an issue.

In conclusion, Mr
Bernard Loing, president of the NGO/UNESCO Liaison Committee, highlighted
the  success of the first day’s Round
Table, openness to the world through the use of communication tools and
positive developments in the world openness Executive Board’s NGO Committee. Mr
Loing said that NGOs set greater store by relations with the NGO Committee, an
ideal forum for engaging with Member States, and hoped that a permanent
structure would be put in place to allow NGOs to report regularly on their
work.

 

See page 8 of the summary document, to read SI’s written contribution to the summary document.The full statement can be found on the SI Resources pages under SI Statements and Reports.

Reported by Yseult Kaplan

SI UN Representative to UNESCO, Paris