A MLL mini Report-Back from 59th Session of the UNHRC
Movement Law Lab’s team delegation in Geneva, Switzerland.
In June, a delegation of movement lawyers that included our staff and members of the GNML, attended the 59th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland to denounce the secret bilateral agreement on migrant externalization between the United States and El Salvador. If you will recall, this resulted in the transfer of 288 migrants (252 of whom are Venezuelans) labelled as “terrorists” from the U.S. to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), allegedly in exchange for the sum of $6 million. For these migrants it meant harsh conditions of confinement, deprivation of their human rights and ill-treatment as they were held incommunicado and in legal limbo for nearly half a year. Individuals were taken without due process or the opportunity to challenge their transfer and imprisonment to a third country.
We met with UN officials, Special Procedures, and representatives of delegations (mainly from Latin America and Asia) and were struck by the paralysis of the system as a whole and the sense of helplessness that both the multilateral body and the various countries we met showed in the face of a massive human rights violation involving extrajudicial transfers, torture, and enforced disappearances. The agreement between the U.S. and El Salvador is an example of the transition from multilateralism to a coercive bilateralism.
We found that in many cases, countries were discouraged by fear of U.S. tariff reprisals and in others by inaction due to a sense of guilt at knowing that they are not good examples of respect for migrants' rights. States displayed a staggering inertia, while outside Geneva, violence against migrants and the most oppressed groups accelerates at a dizzying pace, leading the world toward an increasingly uncertain future for human rights. The international legal architecture that has been put in place since the end of the Second World War was meant to prevent the recurrence of genocide and world wars. With the genocide in Gaza, the criminalization of migration, the rearmament of countries in the Global North, and the escalation of militarism around the world, increased doubts are raised about the UN's effectiveness in preventing these events and fulfilling the mission for which it was created. To do so, the UN must reshape itself to survive these turbulent times and effectively uphold human rights.
