The governance of migration-related services: Does Human Rights literacy matter?

Welcoming migrants and implementing measures to guarantee their inclusion and integration are public administrations’ key duties and goals within the constraints of national and international norms and regulations. In this paper, we present a study based on the experience being collected within the framework of easyRights, an ongoing Horizon2020 project aiming at easing migrants’ access and use of public services to guarantee their inclusion and integration. The project is providing evidence that, in addition to well-known obstacles frequently making services access hard for migrants (like linguistic gaps, bureaucratic complexities, complicated interfaces), a relevant and sometimes disruptive role is played by the limited literacy regarding human rights general principles, prescriptions, and norms among people dealing with migrants’ needs and problems. This limitation often inhibits existing rights enforcement and implementation thus restricting migrants’ opportunities. As stated in the EU Charter, human rights are the basis of a pluralistic democracy, founded on the universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality, and solidarity, which are the common European heritage. Therefore, protecting and promoting fundamental rights is the main duty of the European public administration at the supranational, national, and regional levels. Here we present the conceptual framework that we developed to investigate the human rights literacy of public and private actors in charge of providing services to migrants. We also discuss some preliminary research results findings of that investigation, focusing on different services provided to migrants in four different European cities, namely Palermo in Italy, Larissa in Greece, Malaga in Spain, and Birmingham in the UK.