Universal periodic review as a migration desecuritization instrument:

the case of Spain

Abstract

For the last decades, it was observed that the migration subject was addressed as a security issue due to a social construction proposed by the state that sees immigrants as a threat to security, in which they are subconsciously considered as “the other”. Thus, migration issues started to be analyzed under the security bias, which resulted in the topic being securitized instead of politicized and discussed by all sectors of society and under the human rights scope. In 2006 the United Nations Human Rights Council created the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism, which allows all UN member states to have their human rights situations reviewed every four years and a half. In this respect, the paper aims at presenting how the UPR mechanism may be a tool to desecuritize the migration subject by using Spain as a study case, which is the country that receives more recommendations about migrants among all UN member states. Therefore, the research focuses on a comprehensive evaluation of documents on Spain outcomes in the first two UPR cycles, in order to identify the main recommendations about the migration subject and to understand the interventions related to Spain's position on accepting or not such recommendations. The purpose here is to check the effectiveness of the UPR as a tool that may contribute to the desecuritization of the migration subject under the human rights perspective. The research focuses on a review of documents and bibliographic references, with a qualitative approach and exploratory nature. The initial result points out that the interactive discussion promoted by the UPR mechanism can help support to desecuritize the migrant issue.