Participants at the two-day summit in Mexico said they hope to come up with concrete, workable proposals to curb as a worrying trend of “transcontinental human trafficking” and “mass detention of migrants.”
Rabat – Morocco is participating in a two-day summit on migration and global human trafficking networks in the capital of Mexico.
The summit, organized by the Ibero-American federation, the Network on Migration and Human Trafficking, and the Mexican council on human rights, convenes more than twenty countries from the Ibero-American federation as well as a number of observer states.
The Ibero-American summit is an annual event that gathers government delegates and civil society groups to discuss the shared challenges, mostly human-related, facing countries where Portuguese and Spanish are the main languages, or widely spoken and considered as part of the national identity as in the case of the US and Morocco.
According to the organizers of this year’s event, the goal of the summit is to discuss ways of implementing or contributing to the implementation of the spirit of the recently signed Global Compact on Migration (GCM).
Signed in early December of last year in Marrakech, Morocco, the document was a landmark achievement for migration-related global discussions. It has since become indispensable for any migration-linked summit or agreement at the regional and global levels.
Participants in the two-day summit in Mexico said they hope to come up with concrete, workable proposals to curb what they described as a worrying trend of “transcontinental human trafficking” and “mass detention of migrants” in third countries.
In addition to tackling challenges on the human trafficking front, other topics discussed at the summit include the “origins of migration,” “extra-continental migration,” “non-ordinary migration movements,” and “international protection for migrants.”
With the human rights aspect of the global migration crisis as its focal point, the event hopes, according to the organizers, to be a platform of experience sharing and “ policy coordination” to mitigate the plight of migrants and persons on the move at the global level.
The Moroccan delegation at the summit is headed by Mounir Bensaleh, the newly appointed secretary of the country’s National Council for Human Rights (CNDH).
As the country which hosted the signing of the GCM, Morocco has become a prominent voice in global discussions on the migration crisis.
Morocco’s partnership with the EU on curbing irregular migration in the Mediterranean is the of-cited factor when discussing Morocco and migration.
Since 2014-2016, when the Moroccan King instructed the regularization of as many as 50,000 undocumented sub-Saharans, Morocco has secured a solid reputation for migrant-friendly policies. This has also earned it its leadership position on Africa’s migration agenda.
Of Morocco’s participation in this year’s Ibero-American summit, a CNDH statement noted “humanitarian” and “Pan-African” shift Morocco’s migration policy has experienced in the past three to five years.
Morocco’s hope, it said, is the organization of a global dialogue for the elaboration of rights-based migration policies that protect displaced people and guarantee migrants the most basic, inalienable human rights.
