Mr. President,
We welcome the convening of this important panel discussion. As Governments across all regions crack down on the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, it is more important than ever to ensure robust and consistent monitoring of rights abuses committed against them at borders and in host countries.
Human Rights Watch, together with a coalition of civil society organizations, has been calling for an Independent International Monitoring Mechanism to report on deaths, enforced disappearances, torture and other grave human rights violations faced by people in transit across international borders.
Such a mechanism would complement and strengthen national, regional, and civil society monitoring, by overcoming their inherent gaps and challenges.
Monitoring by national or regional bodies may be compromised because of competing national interests and because frequently they lack access to the other sides of their borders.
In some circumstances there are contentious relations with neighboring governments, especially regarding irregular border crossings, which can complicate monitoring efforts.
Our research and reporting on migrants and refugees’ rights across the world, including at EU borders, the US/Mexico border, in Latin America and Asia, demonstrates the severe gaps in monitoring. As the OHCHR study has highlighted, civil society efforts, while important, are inherently “sporadic and fragmented,” given their resource limitations.
One specific illustrative example relates to the Yemen/Saudi border.
In 2023, Human Rights Watch published a report on Saudi Arabia’s mass killings of Ethiopian migrants on its border with Yemen.
In the aftermath of that report, concerned governments made public statements, Ethiopia announced a joint probe with the Saudi government to investigate the border killing allegations, and the United States and Germany said they had ended their training and funding assistance for Saudi border guards.
Following the publication of our report and the outcry it spurred, Saudi Arabia reportedly stopped the killings for a short time.
Since 2023, however, there has been limited monitoring of the situation.
Human Rights Watch has received reports that killings continue along the border, but we have not been able to verify these claims.
The IOM has reported that migrant deaths and disappearances along the Eastern Route from the Horn of Africa to Gulf countries more than doubled from 2024 to 2025. However, their reporting focuses on statistics, and does not identify perpetrators, nor where the abuses took place.
This example, and many others, illustrate the need for more robust and sustained monitoring, and follow up, at the international level to ensure compliance with international human rights and refugee law. We reiterate our appeal to this Council to establish a robust independent international monitoring mechanism to document serious rights violations at borders around the world without further delay.
Thank you.
