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rights law
MargaretSatterthwaite
The Migrant Workers'Convention was drafted over a 10-year period, and was
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1990. The treaty, which is unusually
long and detailed in comparison to the other major human rights conventions,
was developed through a painstaking process of consensus building among
both receiving and sending states (Hune, 1991). The result is a treaty that
includes a wide range of protections that also contain significant claw-back
provisions which give ratifying states the ability to limit the coverage of the
treaty's norms. For example, while article 41 guarantees the right of
documented migrants to vote in their countries of origin, the second clause of
the article provides that this right shall be facilitated and exercised 'in
accordance with [each country's] legislation'. While some host states have
stronger protections than those included in the treaty for documented workers
(Iredale and Piper, 2003), many of those same states' laws may fall below the
standards set out for undocumented workers. This simultaneous under- and
over-protective nature means that many receiving countries may never sign the
treaty.
Indeed, none of the primary receiving countries have ratified the treaty, and
very few are likely to do so in the near future, making the treaty's entry into
force a limited victory. For feminists concerned about the rights of women
migrants around the world, an excessive focus on the Migrant Workers'
Convention could be detrimental-not only because such a focus would siphon
off needed energy more wisely placed elsewhere-but also because it could
serve to allow states to marginalize the obligations they owe to women
migrants under existing human rights law.
Since there are no real enforcement mechanisms for human rights internationally,
much will depend on whether-and how-advocates take up the discourse of
rights. Indeed, outside of the various regional human rights commissions and
author biography
Margaret Satterthwaite, J.D., is Research Director of the Center for Human Rights
and Global Justice at New york UniversitySchool of Law, where she also co-teaches
the International Human Rights Clinic. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality,
and migration, as well as on evolving strategies for monitoring economic, social
and cultural rights.
references
Bond,J. (2003)'Internationalintersectionality:
a theoreticalandpragmatic exploration
of women's
international humanrights'£moryLawJournal,Vol.5: 71.
Crenshaw, K. (1991)'Mapping the Margins:Intersectionality,
IdentityPoliticsandViolenceAgainst
Womenof Color'Stanford LawReview,Vol.4: 1241.
Crooms,L.A.(1997) 'Indivisible rightsand intersectionalidentitiesor 'WhatDo Women's Human
RightsHaveto do withthe RaceConvention?' tloward LawJournal, Vol.40: 619.
Hune,S. (1991)'Migrant womeninthe contextof the international convention on the protectionof
the rightsof all migrantworkersandmembers of theirfamilies'InternationalMigrationReview,
Vol.XXV: 800.
Iredale,R. and Piper,N. (2003) 'Identification
of the obstaclesto the signingand ratificationof
the UNconventionon the protectionof the rightsof all migrantworkers:TheAsia-Pacific
perspective'InternationalMigrationand MulticulturalPolicies Section, UNESCO. October.