How can civil society organizations use the Global Compact for Migration?
Earlier this year, Global Coalition on Migration International Coordinator, Monami Maulik, spoke with PICUM on the engagement of civil society organizations in the Global Compact for Migration process leading up to the negotiations that took place from March to July of this year.
A final draft of the Compact was agreed to on July 13, 2018, and will be adopted by members states at the Intergovernmental Conference in Marrakesh, Morocco in December.
Civil society organizations have been quite mobilized since the beginning of the compact process in 2016 when governments came together at the UN high level summit on refugees and migrants, and since then through 2017 hundreds of of civil society organizations have participated in consultations in New York and Geneva, but also at national levels and in seven regional civil society consultation processes.
The Coalition has been involved at every step of the Compact process, supporting the capacity and engagement of members to contribute to the formation of this new framework for migration. Maulik explains why it is important for small organizations to participate and mobilize in unity.
What will be important is for the smaller CSO’s that don’t have as much capacity, that are engaged at the national or grassroots level, to work within a network, or to use this process to help formulate networks, national and regional … that are going to make sure that groups on the ground are telling governments whether the commitments they made to human rights protections are materializing… it’s important for those groups to be the ones to play a watchdog role…”