Assessing Legal Mechanisms to Protect Migrants via the Migrant Worker Database

• In Event: Migrant Rights: Practices at the Local, National, and Multilateral Levels

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a new Migrant Worker Rights Database funded by the Australian Research Council, that develops an innovative method to trace the nature and extent of migrant worker rights abuses on the ground. By coding legal decisions on migrant worker rights violations across an array of areas of employment, tortious, human rights and criminal law, alongside coding of media reports, the paper presents a new evidence base for understanding the nature and extent of rights violations. It tracks these violations in all cases brought by such workers in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom over a twenty-year period. This paper will present findings of the extent to which supranational laws (e.g. EU laws, UN conventions, ILO documents) are invoked in the judgments, compared with domestic human rights frameworks (the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada), the Human Rights Act (UK) and the Australian Constitution)). In doing so, the paper provides an empirical basis to assess the salience of domestic compared with international protections of migrant rights at the level of enforcement.

Author

• Anna Katherine Boucher, University of Sydney