A presentation by Diego Acosta (University of Bristol). This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
Adopted by 152 countries at the UN General Assembly in December 2018, the Global Compact on Migration (GCM) aims at achieving ‘safe, orderly, and regular migration along the migration cycle’ through a number of commitments enshrined under 23 objectives. As highlighted by various commentators, the GCM primarily intends to facilitate mobility. Against this background, objective 5 is, arguably, the most important. States commit to enhance, diversify, and expand the ‘availability and flexibility of pathways for regular migration’. Doing that should facilitate ‘labour mobility and decent work’, while at the same time upholding ‘the right to family life’ and responding ‘to the needs of migrants in a situation of vulnerability’. To realise such ambitious commitment, objective 5 proposes the adoption of international and bilateral cooperation arrangements and offers three examples of what they could include: visa liberalisation, labour mobility cooperation frameworks, and free movement regimes. While free movement regimes emerge as the most comprehensive and expansive of such arrangements, they are not defined in the Compact and few scholars have paid attention to them. This project attempts to identify, define and categorise free movement regimes at global level and to distinguish them from other agreements facilitating mobility.
Diego Acosta is an international expert on International, European and comparative Migration law and Professor of European and Migration Law at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is the author of more than 50 publications. His latest monograph The National versus the Foreigner in South America. 200 Years of Migration and Citizenship Law (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is considered as the key reference from a historical and comparative perspective on the region. Acosta has provided his legal opinion to international organisations, governments, and law firms in Europe, the US, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa and testified on migration law reform before parliaments and MEPS in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Uruguay. He has also drafted the written opinion in favour of the applicant in several cases before the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.
