Human Rights are:“The rights one needs in order to enjoy a dignified life or a life worth living”. Imagine leaving your home, your loved ones and everything familiar behind, to go to a new country where you often don’t understand the language, the laws, the culture and where you are sometimes not welcome or even “illegal” because you do not have the right papers. The migrants most vulnerable to abuse are undocumented migrants and women migrants. This is because migrants, by definition, are not citizens of the country in which they work/live and therefore may not always have access to the same rights and protections as nationals do. However, abuse of the human rights of migrants takes place throughout the migratory cycle: in the country of origin, during transit and of course, in the country of destination.
Violation of human rights as a driver for migration
The “push factors” which trigger migration may include domestic inequality, poverty, armed conflicts, racism, intolerance, gender discrimination and democratic deficits . The usual explanations for migrating - to find work, to secure a better livelihood - tend to obscure the regular violations of civil and political rights suffered by the migrants at home, even if those fall below the persecution “threshold” imposed by destination governments to grant claim for asylum. However these violations fuel much, if not most, of global migration. In practise, it has become increasingly difficult to separate refugees from other involuntary migrants or from economic migrants, even if this distinction is a fundamental one for governments as well as the international community as regards to their asylum or immigration laws and policies.
* Taken from the the title of an article published in the Migration Information Source's Special Issue on Migration and Human Rights.