Melbourne Law School - Theses
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ItemProtecting the child-parent relationship: the place of children’s rights in temporary labour migration( 2019)Low-waged, temporary labour migration (TLM) is a global phenomenon that involves the migration of workers for months or years at a time generally without their dependent children. This thesis examines how policies governing this form of migration interfere with provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) (‘CRC’) that protect the child-parent relationship and parental role in children’s lives. The specific CRC provisions examined in this thesis include children’s rights to be cared for by their parents as far as possible under Art 7; to maintain direct and regular contact and relations with their parents if separated transnationally under Art 10(2); to receive direction and guidance from their parents under Art 5; and to have their family life (which includes their relationship with their parents) protected against arbitrary interference under Art 16. It also examines State obligations under the CRC to provide appropriate assistance to parents to enable them to fulfil their responsibilities and role as their children’s primary caregivers under Art 18, which includes assisting parents to provide for their children’s overall development needs under Art 27. This thesis argues that, to date, States have failed to address or justify interferences with these children’s rights caused by TLM policies that deliberately disrupt the child-parent relationship. It combines a human rights-based framework with qualitative social science research to understand State duties under human rights law to protect the child-parent relationship; identify potential harms to children’s rights caused by TLM policies that create prolonged periods of child-parent separation; and recommend measures to reduce interferences with children’s rights by better supporting the maintenance of the child-parent relationship in the context of TLM. The rights examined in this thesis are considered in light of general obligations and principles in international human rights law that include the obligation on States to give due consideration to children’s best interests in all policies affecting them; the principle that the family is the most fundamental unit in society entitled to protection by the State; and the principle of international cooperation, which entails that the protection of children’s rights is a shared responsibility between labour-sending and labour-receiving countries.
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ItemOrdering human mobility: international law, development, administration( 2017)This thesis examines how international laws and institutions have come to regulate human mobility in the contemporary world. The last two decades have seen a flurry of activity within international institutions concerned with facilitating the movement of people between states, including to and from states in the Global South. In this thesis, I characterise this activity as a form of international administration through which international institutions exercise authority over mobile people and contribute to shaping the conditions and possibilities of human mobility. In the contemporary moment, I argue that the international administration of human mobility has made lawful particular forms of human mobility, crafted certain migrant subjectivities and shaped specific practices of statehood for governing human mobility. This thesis demonstrates this argument through narrating three illustrative episodes of international migration administration from the mid-20th century onwards. These episodes identify a repertoire of techniques and practices that international institutions have used to render human mobility a problem of international concern and a subject of international administration. Specifically, I show that these diverse techniques and practices have been organised around two technologies of international administration: those of ‘population’ and the ‘human’. In paying attention to how these techniques and practices of international institutions have come to order different forms and subjects of international migration, this thesis foregrounds two recurring imperatives of the international administration of human mobility: that of authorising the lawful control of states over human mobility on the one hand, and that of facilitating and regulating the ‘optimal’ movement of peoples across the world on the other. I contend that the articulation of these imperatives has been mediated through the enterprise of development directed towards Third World states and people that underpins the contemporary international administration of human mobility. This thesis thus invites readers to take seriously how international law and institutions have shaped and ordered human mobility in the world. This thesis suggests that the techniques and practices of international migration administration have important consequences for the states and people of the Global South, who in the contemporary moment have become both subjects of ever-more restrictive migration controls and objects of ever-more prescriptive political interventions.