What Shapes the Migrant Rights Issue Areas UN Treaty Body Committees Care About?

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 21: Political Behavior and Identity

Abstract

Through a case study of the tripartite interactions between the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Japanese Government, and Japanese migrant rights civil society organizations (CSOs) at the CERD’s reviews of the Japanese Government’s periodic reports, this study aims to shed light on the factors that shape what migrant rights issue areas are prioritized and mentioned in CERD’s Concluding Observations (COs) to the Japanese Government. Publicly available documents released by the three parties across all of Japan’s periodic CERD review sessions are coded to quantify each party’s interest in 26 issue areas. The data are analyzed using heatmaps and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). fsQCA is used to ascertain the sufficient conditions under which an issue receives high levels of mentionings in the COs. Preliminary results suggest that COs are functions of 1) the content of an issue itself; 2) consistent issue problematization over/across reviews; 3) whether an issue is problematized before or after the CERD’s attention to the issue has become institutionalized; 4) the extent to which there are globally institutionalized cultural scripts surrounding the issue area; and 5) issue problematization via key parties such as CSOs. CSOs have had indirect, staggered, and lagged cascadal impacts on the content of COs, but their efforts in the review processes have added a significant number of substantive issues to the reviews’ agendas over the years. Additionally, while CSOs started out as consumers/adopters of UN norms concerning general protective measures for migrants, over time, they seem to have evolved into arbiters and maintainers of these general protective measures.

Author

• Ralph Ittonen Hosoki, Sophia University