Championing a more inclusive, compassionate approach around migration

“I’m a big believer that everyone deserves the very best standard of care that we can give,” said Rebecca, a midwife and medical team leader on board the Ocean Viking, a ship that has been in service since 2019 and fitted for search and rescue missions of migrants found in the Central Mediterranean. “It has become so politicized that people have stopped seeing people on the move as people, and they have started to see them only as problems. And there is a constant dehumanization of people on the move.”

The vessel is managed by SOS Méditerranée, a European humanitarian organization dedicated to rescue at sea. It was founded in 2015 by citizens to act in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe of shipwrecks in the Central Mediterranean.

According to UN Human Rights, an increasing number of migrants and refugees are being forced to leave their homes due to a range of complex factors. Human rights violations against people on the move can encompass the denial of civil and political rights, such as arbitrary detention, torture, and lack of due process, as well as economic, social, and cultural rights, including access to work, health, housing, and education. These violations are often driven by discriminatory laws and deeply ingrained attitudes of prejudice and xenophobia. Yet, when people manage to arrive in another country, such discriminatory attitudes and treatment often continue.

Harmful and dehumanizing narratives around migration have long fuelled fear, division, and exclusion.

“These narratives not only target migrants and refugees but also vilify those who defend their rights, resulting in the criminalization and obstruction of vital humanitarian and human rights work,” said Carolina Hernandez, Advisor on Migration & Human Rights at UN Human Rights. “This troubling trend jeopardizes the human rights of both people on the move and their defenders and also undermines the very values that underpin democratic and humanitarian societies. After all, what will become of us if being kind and helping one another is not permitted?”

Saving lives at sea

Rebecca said there is a misconception that all migrants are adult men, but the reality is that many of them are men and women under the age of 18.

“All of them have gone through things that I can’t even imagine,” she said. “The youngest person that I have rescued at sea was 10 days old. They’ve been at sea for three days and the mother had a c-section, and you have to think, what would drive a woman to get into a rubber boat less than a week after a major abdominal surgery… There just needs to be recognition that when you humanize the people again and you tell their stories or you give them the power to tell their own stories, you realise actually they are no different from us… We need to show people that everyone is human.”

Changing the narrative

UN Human Rights envisions this narrative that everyone is human — one that does not vilify, but celebrates solidarity, kindness, and the fundamental human connections that hold all communities together. This is why the Office collaborated with Magda Castría, a feminist illustrator and graphic designer from Argentina, to create a collection of hope-based illustrations. These can be used by educators, civil society organisations and activists to convey the values that underpin the work of human rights defenders, as well as how people are treated within societies no matter where they come from or what they look like. This project was produced in collaboration with the Greek Council for Refugees, PICUM, and Refugee Support Aegean.

Risking it all

Human rights defender and lawyer Nour Khalil is the co-founder and executive director of the Refugees Platform in Egypt. His organization supports victims and survivors of human rights violations in Egypt with a focus on people on the move who are living in Egypt or using Egypt as a transit country. They provide support to people on the move, including legal support. He is currently operating from exile because of his work with migrants. He started to work with migrants because he could see a huge lack of support for people on the move.

Khalil said that although he is safe in exile, he still receives death threats for his humanitarian work, adding that “in the context of the organized hate campaigns that migrants in Egypt and their defenders face, which also includes the families of defenders, while community leaders and defenders from self-organized groups are exposed to these types of threats, they face direct violence that reaches forced deportation.”

“The community itself supports each other. Every day I am learning new things about life in general and cultures [through the immigrants I meet], and that’s why I do this work.”

For Savvas Alexandros Pavlidis, the plight of people on the move in Greece is something he can’t ignore. He is a volunteer for Elaphi Self-Organized Citizen Movement, a social organization that works with people who are left to camp outside the government headquarters in Rhodes, Greece, before they are sent to refugee camps.

According to Hernandez, the harm against migrants and refugees and the need for civil society support arises because of the gap in governments meeting their obligations to set up functioning human rights protection systems. Yet, many individuals and organizations who provide support, end up targeted or punished for their acts of kindness.

“Refugees end up sleeping in the middle of town on the streets and in the parks, in the hundreds,” Pavlidis said. “There’s no infrastructure to take care of them until they’re moved to where the camps are, and in the meantime, they remain unregistered, and nobody is allowed to take care of them. You can be accused of being a trafficker if you take them to the hospital in a private car.”

According to Hernandez, this means Pavlidis and the other volunteers are putting themselves in danger for helping them, even if under international law, they could not be considered traffickers. But they continue to help migrants by finding out who needs medical care and provide vital information about their rights.

“We’re not obliged to do it and we know we have to go out of our way to do it, but it’s just not something that I can ignore,” he said. “It’s people with dreams and with a past.”

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Source: UN Human Rights