Every year on 18th December, the world marks International Migrants Day, a day set aside to acknowledge the important contribution of migrants while highlighting the challenges they face.
Migrants have proven to be a source of prosperity, innovation and sustainable growth to countries of origin, transit, and host countries.
Their financial contribution through remittance offers a lifeline to families and spurs local markets, especially those of Low- and Middle-Income Countries, while their role in the labour market remains invaluable, as evident on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic response.
Their knowledge, networks, and skills have contributed significantly to developing resilient communities.
It is clear that immigration can be beneficial for migrants, but only if their rights are protected properly. Due to the persistent lack of safe and regular migration pathways, since 2014, more than 50,000 migrants have lost their lives on migratory routes worldwide.
Migrant smuggling is a global organised crime that endangers the lives, safety and security of people. In Southeast Asia, it remains a complex issue as multiple countries in the region are often both the source, the destination, and the transit point for these illegal activities.
We interviewed Dr Marika McAdam, human rights consultant and advisor and a member of the Human Rights at Sea Board of Trustees, to discuss her collaboration with the United Nations on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to develop and deliver training on Smuggling of Migrants at Sea, and the challenges facing Southeast Asia and the globe when it comes to protecting human rights at sea.
Having recently delivered training in Indonesia and Malaysia on dealing with smuggled migrants humanely, including in the maritime context, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing Southeast Asia in the coming years regarding human rights?
The region is being tested on several fronts at the moment. People are taking to the Andaman Sea on smuggling vessels to flee conflict and persecution, or being smuggled across maritime borders, to seek risky work opportunities that may ultimately lead to situations of exploitation, or even human trafficking or slavery.
The transnational organized crime that is so often involved in these flows is often unchecked and unchallenged by States whose responsibility it is to fight crime. And while most countries of the region are party to key human rights treaties, the standards and principles set out at the international level are often yet to be domesticated into national law and practice. Particularly when it comes to people smuggled at sea, the politicization of the underlying causes, tends to distract from human rights obligations to the people affected.
Many countries in the region assert the primacy of their sovereignty yet fail to exercise that sovereignty to protect human rights in their jurisdiction. And so far, State-led coordination mechanisms mandated to address issues like human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and other transnational crime have not proven particularly agile in convening countries across the region to have critical conversations about urgent human rights challenges.
How does this differ from somewhere like, for example, the UK – are there specific traits or characteristics of the area that necessitate different actions?
The smuggling that occurs in Southeast Asia takes place on top of a myriad of challenges the region is facing. The Myanmar coup in February 2021 compounded so many problems for the region, and the military junta has shown it has no hesitation in brazenly violating the most fundamental human rights of its people, often with limited censure from its neighbours.
And across the region, the basic human rights that are necessary for the enjoyment of other rights are also compromised. For instance, human rights like freedoms of association, information and expression that underpin healthy debate and discussion about complex issues - like maritime migration, human exploitation and human rights abuses - are under threat.
Civil society groups often operate in precarious and restrictive environments. This is different in the UK, where free and open debate is a part of the democratic process, and where a diversity of stakeholders – including civil society groups – are given a seat at the table, and can even criticise the government, and powerful companies and individuals, without risking their work or even their lives and liberty.
Fundamental human rights and freedoms are at least generally aspired to, rather than seen as a threat to political power and autocratic rule. In short, a key challenge is that merely talking about human rights in some contexts can be fraught, and even when there is talk, there is often insufficient action.
The UK Government recently examined the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) – with Martyn Illingworth, Human Rights at Sea Head of Operations, stating that “[the government] are yet to take any tangible action to tackle the countless numbers of abuses occurring at sea.” What would you like to see happen as a minimum standard, and what steps would need to be taken by the government?
Firstly, it would be wonderful if governments in Southeast Asia and other regions also examined the role of UNCLOS alongside other treaties to consider whether they remain fit for purpose – and agreed that one of the purposes of international law is prevention of human rights abuses.
The significant challenges Southeast Asia faces with respect to illegal, unreported, unregulated (IUU) fishing, transnational crime, forced and irregular migration, and trafficking and enslavement of citizens of Southeast Asian nations, both within the region and beyond, including in maritime contexts, make these urgent questions to ask.
As a minimum standard, there should be unequivocal recognition of the fact that human rights apply at sea as they do on land.
Steps towards achieving human rights in practice involve, firstly, acknowledgement by governments – as duty-bearers in international law – of the human rights abuses that take place in their jurisdiction, whether in their waters, by their citizens, of their citizens, or on vessels flagged to them. And secondly, taking stock of the mechanisms that do and don’t exist to identify and confront those abuses.
The Geneva Declaration of Human Rights at Sea, of course, offers a useful framework for these assessments.
Currently, the lack of clear admission and articulation of the problems that exist makes them difficult to cohesively confront.
How can responsible commissioners, companies, or individuals avoid accidentally supporting those committing human rights abuses? With the scale being on a global level, what are the best ways for people to face up to these challenges?
Obviously, more effort is needed to ensure that supply chains don’t involve human rights abuses, including of fishers and seafarers who may be trafficked into maritime spaces or even enslaved in them. There is a lot of great work being done on that front, but beyond that, we need to call into question the system by which vessels are flagged and the use made of flags of convenience to allow human rights abuses to occur with impunity.
When it comes to addressing migrant smuggling – where vessels are very often unflagged - the long-term solution is to give people real opportunities to lead decent lives in their homelands and safe and regular pathways elsewhere so that smugglers have no demand to supply to.
But in the meantime, States, as the main duty bearers under international law, need to get serious about confronting the reality of dangerous irregular maritime movement and exploitation of people at sea. They must catalogue, in earnest, the role of transnational organised crime, conflict, corruption, insufficient governance, and poor labour and migration policies that are the root cause of these problems, rather than problematising and punishing the vulnerable people who suffer the consequences of these deficiencies.
As you say, these problems are global, and therefore the solutions must be too.
We have drawn invisible borders at sea, but the reality for criminals is that the sea is a boundless space used to move people, narcotics, weapons, wildlife and waste across the globe for criminal profit. So long as countries fail in their obligations to cooperate across borders and to share burdens and responsibility for the people affected, then human rights abuses – and the flow-on harms to communities and countries – will only continue.
Why do you support the Human Rights at Sea Charity? What made you interested in protecting human rights abuses on a global scale?
Many years ago, in Italy, I watched State and non-state actors cooperate in the disembarkation of around 800 people who had recently been rescued at sea. Many had travelled overland from Sub-Saharan Africa all the way to Libya before being smuggled across the Mediterranean.
Many of the women had already been disembarked and taken to hospital after having been raped. Whether they had been raped in Libya or at sea, and by who, I don’t know. I knew enough about the intersection of migrant smuggling with human trafficking to wonder at the fates of the people who were being triaged on arrival.
This brought home to me the very real challenges for receiving States trying to do the right thing by people who have been failed by their own States and whose good-will is abused by criminals. It also brought home the challenge of protecting people as individuals with individual plights, passions and protection needs, whose individuality is at risk of being blurred in a collective ‘mass’ of people.
The scale of this phenomenon, of course, doesn’t change the human rights obligations, but it does increase the challenge of fulfilling them.
Years later in Thailand, I met a Burmese man who had been trafficked into the fishing industry. He had been exploited for years, and had lost several fingers to a fishing net. I recall the shame I felt at thinking that he had been ‘lucky’, given that people enslaved at sea have been murdered when they have been injured.
These encounters, and others like them, seized me of the fact that the complexities we face in confronting human rights abuses on land, are horrendously compounded at sea. The diversity of actors and expertise required to mount effective, comprehensive responses in the maritime space are like nothing I have encountered before.
And the sea is not a small part of the planet; it accounts for 70% of it!
Sadly, Human Rights at Sea is unique in its raison d'être of addressing human rights on part of the globe that is so central to all of our lives and yet so often overlooked.
If you are interested in joining or supporting future training on Smuggling of Migrants at Sea contact: Dr. Rebecca Miller, Regional Coordinator (Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling), UNODC Regional Office for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Rebecca.miller@un.org
Contact: If you have any questions, please write to us at enquiries@humanrightsatsea.org
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