Rethinking the migrant rights agenda in global migration governance: a decolonized rights-based approach

In this chapter, we draw on the transnational migrant rights movements, with a particular focus on the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA) and its engagement with the national context of Nepal. We argue for the need to decolonize the human rights discourse within global migration governance. While doing so, the chapter provides a normative and institutional critique of the human rights discourse and proposes a decolonized rights-based approach which brings to the fore the voices and needs of migrant workers. Through foregrounding the leadership of local and regional migrant rights activists and their collective organizations, migrant rights agendas must be and are in fact being reframed. Applied to the case of temporary labour migration as practised across Asia and the Middle East, this decolonized rights-based approach to migration governance, we argue, focuses on mitigating the drivers of migration so that migration becomes a matter of choice, and not necessity, and on addressing the living and working precarities faced by migrant workers in the destination countries. On a more general level, such a decolonized approach generates a deeper commitment to human and labour rights on the part of both more developed and less developed regions, and migrant origin and destination countries.