BVMN UN Advocacy intervention at the panel: "Protecting Migrants’ Rights at Borders: Independent Monitoring in EU and Global Contexts"

On 25 June 2025, our United Nations Advocacy Coordinator Joseph Cripps spoke at a panel titled "Protecting Migrants’ Rights at Borders: Independent Monitoring in EU and Global Contexts" organised by the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung on the margins of the United Nations 59th Human Rights Council.

Among the panelists were Mr. Gehad Madi, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, H.E. Mrs. Francisca E. Méndez Escobar, the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations, and Ms. Aydan Iyigüngör from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

You can watch the full panel below. We are also publishing the full transcript of Joseph's speech below.

Good afternoon,

My name is Joseph Cripps, United Nations Advocacy Coordinator for the Border Violence Monitoring Network.

I would first like to thank the Special Rapporteur and F.E.S for the invitation to speak at today’s event and for their continued dedication for the inclusion of grassroots voices.

The Boder Violence Monitoring Network is a collation of organisations documenting pushbacks, and other forms of State violence at and within borders including in Europe and the western Balkans.

Through our field-based member organisations, we have documented how border zones have become waste lands for human rights, with torture, sexual and gender-based violence and enforced disappearance being proliferated by state authorities with complete impunity across Europe.

Since 2017, our network alone has documented the pushback of over 30,000 people and show how border management policies are characterised by extreme violence.

We have documented pushbacks in which persons have gone missing and likely died due to being forced to cross rivers at gunpoint, we documented migrants being stranded on islet, abandon in militarised zones, and even deliberately thrown form border fences. 

These systematic and widespread practices in which state parties across Europe and beyond, deliberate and wilfully violate fundamental rights at borders underscores our discussion today.

At the moment, states across Europe have started to develop and implement so called intendent border monitoring mechanism, but already, concerns are being raised that these mechanisms are neither independent, nor function as an effective monitoring body.

In one EU country, in which pushbacks have proliferated for many years, its newly established independent monitoring mechanism visited a Transit Reception Centre and concluded that migrants were treated with full respect for their human rights and informed about their rights in languages they understand.

Yet the countries own National Preventative Mechanism, which has been deemed as Fully compliant with the Paris Principles, reflected upon this visit and highlighted how at this same location, the NPM itself found that that foreigners were not adequately informed about their rights, complaint mechanisms are not ensured, and no translation is provided.

Even more damming, the UN SPT visited the same Transit Reception Centre only a few days before the visit from the Independent Monitoring Mechanism and concluded that “guarantees were ineffective in practice.”

So not only is there concern that states are co-opting independent border monitoring but we are concerned that even when a truly independent monitoring bodies, separate from state influence, are set up – the cocktail of concealment practices that States utilise across Europe to hide the violence they enact against migrants and people on the move, risks the inability for monitoring bodies to carry out their work.

For example, the use of secret and incommunicado detention to temporarily detain migrants outside all formal safeguards has been well documented by out member organisations, with evidence showing states holding migrants in improvised sites such as abandoned buildings, garages, caravans, metal containers and even dog kennels before pushing them back across international borders.

Further to using informal locations, we have also witnessed how the failure to formally register migrants at detention sites is now so widespread it is indistinguishable from official State policy. Our investigation into our one EU member state showed how in a two year period between 2022 and 2023, 96% of pushback testimonies make no reference to registration or the collection of personal information of migrants detained during a pushback.

This lack of registration is not an oversight but a deliberate policy decision to ensure migrants are not locatable, that they remain outside legal safeguarding’s, and that their families, lawyers or representatives have no ability to contact them and challenge the legality of their detention.

Lastly, our members have also constituently documented patterns of so-called coercive voluntary returns in which violence, threats, or prolonged and arbitrary detention in inhuman conditions is used to forcible coerce migrants into signing documents authorising their ‘willingness’ to be removed for the state party. In one EU state, NGOs estimated that at least one hundred and fifty five thousand people were retuned under circumstances of coercion.

These tactics described highlight the extraordinary measures that EU states are taking to hide their crimes, and demonstrated the immense challenge of scrutinising state practices in 2025, and why as the rapporteur said in his intervention, why unannounced visits by independent bodies is so important.

I would like to end by reminding the room, that Independent border monitoring is happening across the EU – but this is happening independent of states through the work and dedication of small grassroots organisations, like our members – who at great personal and political risk, including risking direct criminalisation – take extraordinary steps to document, uncover and expose state perpetrated human rights abuses.

Civil society is where we must now look for evidence of effective monitoring practice, civil society is where we must look for evidence of cross-border methodologies, and as the rapporteur states in his recent report, it is through the involvement of civil society that victim-oriented and gender-responsive support programmes can be established, and it is through the involvement of civil society that any truth and monitoring mechanism can be established.

Thank you very much for your time.