ABSTRACT
Global governance of migration has always been a patchwork of different normative frameworks and agreements. In contrast to the international refugee system, there is no one definitive migration-specific convention. Nor is there a single UN agency mandated to protect migrants although like all human beings, migrants are, at least in principle, protected by international human rights law. National governments, together with an assortment of multilateral and nongovernmental organizations and regional processes participated in a global migration regime that appeared as a weak set of nonbinding norms and practices without a strong consensus (Martin 2015). However, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), a negotiated intergovernmental UN agreement in December 2018, built on the success of post-2000 consultative processes to create a stronger international migration regime. While the GCM, like the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), is not legally binding, the fact that a strong majority of the world’s governments agreed to a variety of political and moral dimensions of migration embedded in the GCM marked an impressive step forward in governance (Newland 2019). As Kevin Appleby states: “the GCM is groundbreaking in the sense that it represents the first multilateral framework for international cooperation on migration governance” (2018, 2).
