A MLL mini Report-Back from 59th Session of the UNHRC
Some members of Movement Law Lab’s delegation
In June, a delegation of movement lawyers that included MLL staff, attended the 59th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland to denounce the secret bilateral agreement on migrant externalization between the United States and El Salvador. If you will recall, this resulted in the transfer of 288 migrants (252 of whom are Venezuelans) labelled as “terrorists” from the U.S. to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), in exchange for the sum of $6 million.
We met with UN officials, Special Procedures, and representatives of delegations (mainly from Latin America and Asia) and were struck by the paralysis of the system as a whole and the sense of helplessness that both the multilateral body and the various countries we met showed in the face of a massive human rights violation involving extrajudicial transfers, torture, and enforced disappearances. The agreement between the U.S. and El Salvador is an example of the transition from multilateralism to a coercive bilateralism. For hundreds of migrants it meant harsh conditions of confinement, deprivation of their human rights and ill-treatment as they were held incommunicado and in legal limbo for nearly half a year. Individuals were taken without due process or the opportunity to challenge their transfer and imprisonment to a third country.
We found that in many cases, countries were discouraged by fear of U.S. tariff reprisals and in others by inaction due to a sense of guilt at knowing that they are not good examples of respect for migrants' rights. States display a staggering inertia, while outside the Geneva, violence against migrants and the most oppressed groups accelerates at a dizzying pace, leading the world toward an increasingly uncertain future for human rights. The international legal architecture that has been put in place since the end of the Second World War was meant to prevent the recurrence of genocide and world wars. With the genocide in Gaza, the rearmament of countries in the Global North, and the escalation of militarism around the world, increasing doubts are being raised about the organization's effectiveness in preventing these events and fulfilling the mission for which it was created.
The system is faltering, and what we found during our visit to Geneva is that there are no sectors within the UN that are committed to actively resisting the attacks that authoritarianism is waging on the multilateral body. The concern expressed to us by UN workers was related to the lack of resources (the Trump administration cut around 40% of the budget allocated to the agency), but no one could tell us what they are actually able to do with the available resources to stop the growing human rights crisis or even justify with creative ideas why they believe the UN needs more funding.
No one seems to be thinking of a way to breathe life into the apparatus so that it can be revitalized to effectively protect human rights. The authoritarian global agenda is taking advantage of the crisis of multilateralism to install an international system based on bilateral agreements between countries, with less accountability mechanisms. Practices such as the transfer to third countries through bilateral agreements (externalization) are beginning to become widespread and must be stopped as soon as possible. The UN must update and streamline its mechanisms for holding states accountable for their human rights obligations, generating the antibodies to resist a fascist take-over of democracy, global governance systems, and human rights.
