As countries around the world are rolling out the first COVID-19 vaccines, several international and regional bodies have recommended the inclusion of migrants (including those who are undocumented) in national vaccine deployment programmes.

The International Organisation on Migration (IOM) issued a statement highlighting that COVID-19 vaccination plans must include migrants if they are to be effective and calling on governments to include all migrants present in their territories (regardless of migration status) in their vaccine deployment plans. IOM is also partnering with the Gavi Vaccine Alliance to improve immunization coverage for migrants, in humanitarian and emergency settings as well as in support of routine immunization through primary health care systems.

Between October and December 2020, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) issued two reports which consider migrants in relation to the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. The first classifies “migrants and refugees” as potential target groups for the vaccination campaigns; the second advises that consideration should be given to settings with “little ability to physical distance” including migrant centres, crowded housing and homeless shelters.

The European Commission issued a Communication (October 2020) on vaccine preparedness, which - in quite vaguer terms - includes “communities unable to physically distance” (such as “refugee camps”) and “vulnerable socioeconomic groups and other groups at higher risk” (such as “socially deprived communities to be defined according to national circumstances”) as “possible priority groups” for vaccines deployment.

In December 2020, the Croatian Centre for Peace Studies filed two criminal complaints against unknown police agents for allegedly keeping in detention thirteen migrants, two of whom were children, and then handing them over to ten armed men dressed in black uniforms, with balaclavas on their heads. According to the complaints, the migrants were tortured, humiliated and pushed back from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina; one of the victims was raped. These cases build on previous reports by UN experts highlighting the use of systematic violence towards migrants by the Croatian police.

The UN human rights committee has found that the Netherlands violated a child’s rights by failing to acknowledge that he was stateless and eligible for international protection. The case involves a boy named Denny, born in the Dutch city of Utrecht in 2010 to a stateless Chinese mother who was trafficked to the Netherlands. With nothing to prove that her son was without a nationality, Denny was registered as “nationality unknown” and they were put in a centre for refused asylum seekers with young children, under a permanent threat of deportation.

Hundreds of migrant parents of British children living in the UK are in danger of becoming undocumented after 1 July 2021. The process by which the UK Home Office grants residence to them may be indiscriminate and unlawful, according to lawyers. 60% of people whose residence is required to enable a British child or dependent adult to live in the UK, saw their residence application rejected in June 2020.

In mid-December, the European Parliament approved the Resolution on the implementation of the Return Directive, which moves away from the exclusive focus on the rates of returns, and stresses that “sustainable returns and successful reintegration are important indicators in the assessment of the effectiveness of returns”. The Resolution further includes important references to the need to prioritise alternatives to detention and provide individual case management and assistance, to prioritise and facilitate voluntary returns, and stresses that children should never be detained.

On 18 November 2020, the Migration and Asylum Minister of Greece, Notis Mitarakis, committed to ending the practice of detaining unaccompanied migrant children in jail cells. He also reported that, as of that date, no unaccompanied migrant children remained in police custody. The practice had been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, which considered it a violation of the right to liberty and security.

A recent survey by the European Migration Network on how countries are dealing with Covid-19 in immigration detention shows that detainees who test positive are either transferred to a medical facility (Croatia, Bulgaria, Italy) or treated in the detention unit unless their condition deteriorates and a transfer is deemed necessary by the centre’s doctor (Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Sweden, Spain). Distribution of protective gear to detainees was only reported in Poland and Slovakia.

A new report by Migreurop on immigration detention in Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain finds that, in 2019, administrative detention was increasingly happening outside or at the margins of existing legal frameworks, and in informal settings, such as police stations and border zones. The EU Pact on Asylum and Migration will likely generalise this practice and turn it into law. The report includes information about detention conditions, including deficiencies in the provision of accommodation, and medical, interpretation and administration services.

Several Italian NGOs have published an analysis of the use of boats to quarantine migrants after search and rescue operations, on which nearly 10,000 people have been detained since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, including families and children. The analysis points to lack of adequate health services available on the boats, the impossibility to maintain social distancing, the high costs of the procedures (which are more expensive than similar structures on land) and issues regarding the legality of the measure. In October, a 15-year old boy died after spending ten days on a quarantine boat on which there was only one doctor available for 600 people.

In December 2020, the World Health Organisation published the results of its survey on the impact of COVID-19 on migrants, including people with irregular status, as experienced and reported by them. 35% of the (more than) 30,000 migrants surveyed said they did not seek health care for suspected COVID-19 infection because of financial constraints, while 22% avoided doing so because of fear of deportation. Responses show that many civil society and other support organisations played an important role in disseminating accessible information on COVID-19.

In December 2020, the United States Congress passed with broad bipartisan support a 900 billion USD coronavirus relief package that will allow mixed status households (comprised of U.S. citizens and undocumented family members) to receive 600 USD of direct COVID-19 related financial assistance, with an additional 600 USD for each dependent child. The legislation also makes mixed status households retroactively eligible for one-time payments of 1200 USD per household and 500 USD per child under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act of March 2020, from which they had been excluded.

In December 2020, three police oversight bodies published a report raising concerns about police sharing information about a victim’s immigration status with the UK immigration authorities. The report recommends that police stop sharing the information of domestic violence victims with immigration authorities “where there is no clear evidence an immigration offence has been committed”, and that the Home Office establish safe reporting mechanisms for migrant victims and witnesses when accessing police services.

The UN Development Programme has published a review of its 2009 study on human mobility, which finds that little progress has been made on visa liberalisation for low skilled migrants in the last decade. On the contrary, policy developments in the field of labour migration pathways were found to increasingly favour “people with skills or wealth”.

The International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) Co-ordinator for Ireland and Britain has requested an urgent meeting with the Irish Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine to discuss the situation of undocumented fishers in the wake of Brexit. According to the federation, undocumented migrants are the main workforce on Irish fishing vessels. ITF calls for protections for all fishers that are left without work due to Brexit, including interim financial support via Ireland’s COVID-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment.

The Civil Society Action Committee, a global platform for civil society engagement on migration policy, has called world governments to take action on regularisation as the keystone to implement the Global Compact for Migration. The calls are included in a paper on the implementation of the Global Compact for Migration in the context of COVID-19, released in December 2020.

Research by Human Rights Watch on the Italian 2020 regularisation programme found important flaws in its design and implementation. In particular, the research points to the restrictive scope of the programme, the lack of clarity about eligibility and the employer sponsorship approach, among others, excluding hundreds of thousands of people and failing to reach most of the farmworkers it was supposed to benefit. Numbers show that only 15% of the applications under the employer sponsorship pathway came from the agricultural sector.