REGINE Regularisations in Europe Final Report - European ...

considered to be “flexible, adaptive and responsive to local labour market needs and
demographic realities”. 289
Furthermore, a regularisation process should be seen as part of a comprehensive strategy and “not as a
measure of last resort when all other measures have failed”. 290 That refers to improvement of
bureaucracy of regularisation programmes, including:
i. Comprehensive review of best practices and impacts;
ii. Taking into account both the concerns of employers and migrants;
iii. Improvement of publicity efforts (ensuring that publicity for the programmes reaches irregular
migrants and that their benefits are explained carefully to the media and to the public in
general);
iv. Administrative preparedness – strengthening the administration to be able to deal with the
potential number of applicants for regularisation; minimum administrative requirements;
guarantees against fraudulent procedures. 291
The ILO also advocates an individual right to ‘earned adjustment’ as an alternative, or complement, to
more general ‘unique’ regularisation measures. It targets irregular migrant workers who cannot be
removed for legal, humanitarian or practical reasons and who have demonstrated that they have a
prospect of settling successfully in the host country: “Migrant workers with irregular status may be
said to earn a right to legal status if they meet certain minimum conditions: they must be gainfully
employed, they must not have violated any laws other than those relating to illegal or clandestine
entry and they must have made an effort to integrate by (for example) learning the local language”. 292
ILO notes that the successful achievement of aims depends on the involvement of all groups that will
be affected: that includes migrants themselves through publicity and information programmes via
channels that migrants trust, such as civic and religious organisations. 293 Furthermore, regularisations
work best when the process is “straightforward” – if the requirements are too demanding, timeconsuming
or costly, they will discourage many of those who are eligible. “Regularization should
instead take the form of a simple act at the lowest possible level of administration, demanding very
little documentation and requiring neither the support of a lawyer nor recourse to the courts.” 294
The Council of Europe has also defined measures accompanying regularisation programmes, which
refer to the following:
289 Council of Europe (CoE) Assembly (2007): Regularisation programmes for irregular migrants. Report
Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population. Rapporteur: Mr John Greenway, United Kingdom,
European Democrat Group. Doc. 11350. Available at:
http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc07/EDOC11350.htm, para. 120
290 Council of Europe (CoE) Assembly (2006): Human Rights of Irregular Migrants. Report Committee on
Migration, Refugees and Population. Rapporteur: Mr Ed van Thijn, Netherlands, Socialist Group. Doc. 10924.
Available at: http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc06/EDOC10924.htm , para.
127
291 CoE Assembly 2007, Report, op. cit., para. 107-111
292 ILO (2004): op. cit. p. 120, para. 399
293 ILO (2004): op. cit. p. 120
294 ILO (2004): op. cit. p. 120
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