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MANILA, Philippines -- The Second Global Forum on Migration and Development, which the Department of Foreign Affairs will spearhead, has been criticized for being focused on what governments and private enterprises needed and not on the needs of migrant workers.
Agnes Matienzo, project assistant for Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), told INQUIRER.net that previous pre-forum gatherings of the GFMD reflected this attitude.
"Instead of protecting the safety and security of migrants, the GFMD process is focusing more and more on the needs of governments, enhancing the role of the private sector like banks, corporations, recruitment agencies, money transfer companies, and systematically excluding the migrants themselves and civil society," she said.
Matienzo said most governments participating in the GFMD "maintain migrants' exploitation, reinforce gender oppression, undermine human rights, and surrender state responsibility for development, as seen in recent gatherings," citing the United Nations High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development September 2006 in New York City, and the First GFMD July 2007 in Brussels.
She also criticized the GFMD discussions as "very structured and limited the discourse on more pressing and concrete migrant issues."
Together with other non-government organizations, MFA will hold its own parallel forum, starting with discussions next week. An estimated 500 delegates from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific will participate in these discussions.
"The Peoples' Global Action reiterates our call to make the GFMD a genuine forum among governments, migrants, and people's movements to discuss good practices of migration policy that respect migrants' rights, and on a broader scale, all human rights," Matienzo said.
She said the NGO-led meetings would focus on how the rights of migrants should always be protected, how past development programs of government have failed, and why people were in the first place pushed to migrate, despite the risks.
Matienzo said that while NGOs were included in the official civil society days programmed into the GFMD, the process of participation was "restrictive."
"Only 30 Philippine [civil society organization] representatives will be chosen to join the 200 official global CSO participants," she said.
