Introduction

The UN has developed a number of international human rights conventions that many states have ratified, thus committing themselves to respect the rights these conventions set out. These core human rights conventions derive directly from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rights universally recognized as benefiting ‘all human beings’. The last of these, the ICRMW, is the most poorly ratified of all, with only forty-one States Parties. But the many states that have not ratified the Convention to date are bound by some or all of the other six conventions. These states often argue that migrants are sufficiently protected by their provisions and that there is therefore no need to ratify the ICRMW.

To what extent are migrant workers' rights effectively protected by the six other UN human rights conventions? Is the ICRMW really unnecessary in the international human rights framework? What protection does the UN human rights system give to migrants and how is it implemented? What are the gaps? These questions are at the heart of this chapter, which aims to clarify the place of migrant workers' rights in the overall UN human rights framework. It is based on a UNESCO-sponsored research project undertaken jointly by December 18 and the ICMC, which included the study of all country-specific conclusions and recommendations, those issued by the six treaty monitoring bodies supervizing the implementation and those by the States Parties, of conventions other than the ICRMW, from 1994 to 2005.