The Global Compacts: A Missed Opportunity or a Promising Tool?

Guest Speaker: Carolina Gottardo, Director, Jesuit Refugee Service

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) were broadly adopted in December 2018. The adoption of the global compacts has been one of the main developments on international migration governance for decades.

This talk will explore the process for adoption of the compacts focusing particularly on the GCM and also looking at its content. It will explore whether the compacts could be used as a tool or whether their adoption has been a missed opportunity. The talk will also focus on the global architecture for implementation of the global compacts and how new mechanisms and processes are developing.

Carolina Gottardo is a lawyer and economist who has worked on human rights issues for more than 20 years in different countries and contexts. Carolina's areas of specialization are gender, asylum and migration. She is the Director of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), Australia. Previously she was the director of a women's rights organisation working with refugee and migrant women in the UK for 6 years. Carolina has been in senior management for more than 15 years at the British Institute of Human Rights, British Red Cross and Womankind Worldwide in the UK and the Refugee Council of Australia. She worked for the Constitutional Court and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in her native country, Colombia.

Carolina has served on a number of boards in London, Brussels, Bangkok and Melbourne including law centres and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM). Carolina is currently the cochair of the End Child Detention Coalition (ECDC) Australia and the chair of the women and girls group, member of the board and focal point on the Global Compact on Migration at the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN). She is also a board members of the global International Detention Coalition (IDC). Carolina has excellent advocacy experience at national, regional and UN levels. She is a member of the UN Women’s global Expert Working Group to address the human rights of women in the Global Compact on Migration.