UN experts raise concerns over Council of Europe migration declaration

UN experts on Tuesday voiced deep concern over the Council of Europe’s recently adopted Chisinau Declaration on migration.

“Migration governance must remain grounded in human rights. Border management cannot come at the expense of the prohibition of torture, ill-treatment and other serious harms, effective remedies, and non-discrimination,” the experts said in a written statement.

The declaration, adopted in May, is seen as aiming to clarify how the European human rights system should operate in migration cases and to reaffirm states’ right to control their borders. Critics, however, argue it risks creating a two-tier system of rights and increasing political pressure on courts to interpret protections more narrowly.

The statement recalled that recent political initiatives purporting to rebalance the European Convention on Human Rights in migration matters risk normalizing human rights violations and promoting restrictive interpretations of states’ obligations.

“We are disappointed that the Declaration materialises concerns we previously raised, including the prioritisation of coercive migration control, restrictions on access to asylum, expanded detention and returns, the weakening of due process, and other actions that could lead to death, torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearance or persecution of migrants,” the experts said.

They warned that the Declaration’s renewed emphasis on subsidiarity and a potentially excessive margin of appreciation for states “should not become a proxy to justify measures that violate States’ obligations under the Convention and undermine independent oversight by the European Court of Human Rights.”

The experts noted that the promotion of “new approaches,” including extraterritorial asylum processing, return hubs, and cooperation with transit countries, raises concerns about compatibility with international human rights law, particularly the principle of non-refoulement.

A key point of contention also concerns Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment without exception.

The declaration states that the threshold for treatment to qualify as inhuman or degrading should remain “high and constant,” while avoiding what it describes as “unnecessary constraints on decisions to extradite or to expel foreign nationals.”

“We wish to recall that these ‘constraints’ are there to ensure that the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment is indeed absolute in practice,” the experts said.

They further underscored that the credibility of the human rights system and the rule of law depends on strict adherence to core principles, adding: “Only by respecting the rights of every person, without discrimination, can States uphold their commitments under the Convention.”

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