MIGRATION CONTROL AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS

Fariborz Karami, a 26-year old asylum seeker, committed suicide at the Regional Processing Centre in Nauru on 15 June 2018. He was held in immigration detention since 2013, first on Christmas Island and later on Nauru. Karami had been kidnapped, detained and threatened to be killed as a 10-year-old boy in Iran, resulting in severe trauma, and had consistently asked for medical help while his mental health deteriorated on Nauru. Two years later, in May 2020, Tewelde Andom, a 39-yearold Eritrean man, died in a migrant detention centre in Libya. He is thought to have died of heatstroke, as temperatures in the detention centre reached 42 degrees. He had escaped Eritrea in 2017 after spending nearly two decades doing military service and had attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea in 2018 but was returned to Libya by the Libyan Coast Guard. At the same time, Richard, a 9-year-old boy from Honduras, lived in a tent with his mother in a makeshift migrant camp in Matamoros, a Mexican city on the US-Mexico border. The only school Richard attended was the Sidewalk School, a volunteer initiative to mitigate the eff ects of migrant children's lack of education.

The cases of Fariborz Karami, Tewelde Andom and Richard are three examples among many, as violations of the rights to an adequate standard of living, health and education of people on the move are structural rather than incidental in many regions of the world. Indeed, on Nauru mental health problems are rampant among asylum seekers and refugees, with more than half having suicidal thoughts. In Libya, many detainees in migrant detention centres are severely malnourished, lacking water, held in conditions amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment, and dozens of detainees suffer from tuberculosis, some of whom died of the disease. More generally, detention conditions in Libya are particularly dire and ‘fall well below accepted international standards.’ The Matamoros migrant camp where Richard lived hosted thousands of asylum seekers, including hundreds of children, who lived in tents in squalid conditions, with limited access to essential services such as sanitation, health care and education.