CMR Lecture of October 2005 (Lecture)

“It is essential to vindicate that human rights are inherent to every human being.”

Based on this reaffirmation our intention is to study to what extent this assertion is really deemed true for irregular migrants, that is, reporting if the equality, the freedom and the dignity established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are breached in certain circumstances. For this aim, we will study four different aspects: The definition of the concepts migrant and irregular, who is a migrant in irregular situation; Then who decides it and how, that is the legal construction of irregularity and how it is used by States to discriminate citizens and aliens as holders of human rights.

The third part will be focus on whether the irregularity is a condition for not enjoying human rights -citizenship and nationality as boundaries- and the labour of UN in this topic, in particular the Migrant Workers Convention and the Special Rapporteur on Migrant Workers.

Finally, we will end up with the question of an unstable notion of irregularity, are States sovereign in this subject or are they responsible before International Law?