Part #4, Final 2017 Segment, Bangor University Law School and Wales Observatory for Youth and Human Rights – ‘Children Displaced Across Borders’ Project Hungary Field-research
As a representative from Bangor University Law, Research Fellow with the International Communities Organization, and Researcher with Bangor/Swansea University’s Wales Observatory for Youth and Human Rights’ ‘Children Displaced Across Borders’ project, I completed my fourth and final 2017 field research in Belfast, Hungary. As a presenter with the European Migration Network National Contact Point Hungary XIX, National EMN Conference held in Budapest Hungary – November 2017, I led in panel one and joined in the additional three panels:
- Challenges of the changing migratory trends
- European responses to changing migratory trends (Part I)
- European responses to changing migratory trends (Part II)
- Developments in the field of return policy
Through the Hungarian Minister of Interior’s Department of European Cooperation, I had an opportunity to participate and to share my research using my critical-case study of the Rohingya population as an example of how state obligations to the ratified Palermo Protocols and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) requires specific prevention and protection measures for children displaced across borders – migrating and stateless. Moreover, my presentation encompassed how Hungary’s Schengen Border control responsibilities increase their encounters with border control and the prevention, protection, and prosecution (3-P index) responsibilities under their ratification of the Palermo Protocols, which also provides resources and transnational commitments. I prompted the Hungarian and EU leadership representatives to crucial elements of the Palermo Protocol and legal empowerment. I conveyed that much of the work needed to establish frameworks to fulfill the requirements have already been done and resourced at the international law level.
My work also promoted the then upcoming 16 November 2017 Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (CMW) and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) that adopted two Joint General Comments, which include useful language clarifying treaty norms relating to childhood statelessness.
1) The first, ‘Joint General Comment No. 3 of the CMW and No. 22 of the CRC in the context of International Migration: General principles’ includes explicit references to statelessness as a basis of protection for children in such a context: http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CRC/Shared%20Documents/1_Global/CMW_C_GC_3_CRC_C_GC_22_8363_E.pdf
2) The other, ‘Joint General Comment No. 4 of the CMW and No. 23 of the CRC in the context of International Migration: http://www.refworld.org/docid/5a12942a2b.html Whereas, States parties’ obligations in particular with respect to countries of transit and destination’ goes into detail on the right to a nationality. Importantly for the realization of the right to a nationality in a migration context, it calls for the repeal of nationality laws that discriminate with regard to the transmission or acquisition of nationality in relation to not only the child and/or their parents’ race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, but also migration status. It goes on to state that States should ensure that every child’s right to a nationality is respected, protected and fulfilled, by implementing all nationality laws in a non-discriminatory manner, including with regard to residence status and reaffirms that States should strengthen measures to grant nationality to children born in their territory in situations where they would otherwise be stateless.
Photo depicts Dr. Herring presenting and seated at the panel with Hungarian Minister of Interior team and Russian representative. This field research further qualifies the legal premise that legal empowerment is the link to peaceful self-determination. Moreover, it illustrates how international legal instruments, the Palermo Protocol and the UNCRC, are vehicles to achieving peaceful self-determination.
Dr. Tanya Herring, ICO Research Fellow
Ph.D., Doctor of Management, Doctor of Laws Candidate, International Criminal Law and Human Rights Bangor University Law School, Bangor, Wales UK and Researcher, Wales Observatory for Youth and Human Rights
E-mail: [email protected]
