Migrants' Rights Introduction and Current Issues: - Living instrument approach has allowed court to extent protection to areas not considered at time of drafting o However, still rarely able to rely on Article 8 to avoid deportation or to achieve reunification " Leads to Q of whether HR really are universal and whose rights they seek to maintain - Focus of lectures is on the right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 ECHR - Theory points to consider: o Tension between rights protection and state sovereignty o Extent to which human rights law regards migrants as a vulnerable group that needs to be protected, as a group of rights-holders or as a group on the margins of human rights law o Role of domestic courts and European Court of Human Rights in setting limits - Statistics and Politics on Immigration: · Globally: . "The current United Nations global estimate is that there were around 281 million international migrants in the world in 2020, which equates to 3.6 per cent of the global population." UN World Migration Report 2022 o Europe, as per UN World Migration Report 2022 p.87 . Nearly 87 million international migrants lived in Europe in 2020, an increase of nearly 16 per cent since 2015 · A little over half of these (44 million) were born in Europe, but were living elsewhere in the region . In 2020, the population of non-European migrants in Europe reached over 40 million. . In 1990, there were roughly equal numbers of Europeans living outside Europe as non-Europeans living in Europe . However, unlike the growth in migration to Europe, the number of Europeans living outside Europe mostly declined over the last 30 years, and only returned to 1990 levels in recent years . In 2020, around 19 million Europeans were residing outside the continent and were based primarily in Asia and Northern America o Politics and the 'othering' of migrants · Colin Yeo (practitioner) - argues that "exclusionary policies and practices are founded on the premise that migrants are a threat ... to racial purity, to culture, to religion, to value, to traditions, to solidarity, to security, to public funds, to jobs, to women and more" · Distinction drawn between us (natural citizens) and them (migrants), which may be evident in case law
· "The days are gone when politicians could make explicit reference to race but, as Maya Goodfellow argues, references to culture, values, traditions and solidarity have become proxies" o Legal analysis often founded on concepts of integration - to what extent is this a "proxy" for othering · Yeo - "Even discussing 'migrants' as a group at all seems peculiar, given that they are a hugely disparate group of individuals defined only be not being 'us'." · Opportunitstic/economic view of migrants · Opposing view that migrants should be regarded as an economic opportunity o H/e - migrants who are perceived as desirable tend to be defined as exceptional compared to others; they are