There can be no more fitting a day to publish a collection of articles focused on migrants’ rights than 18 December, International Migrants Day. The seven articles in this Special Issue of the International Journal of Law in Context explore the consequences for migrants’ rights of two related international developments.

The first is the adoption in 2015 of the UN Sustainable Development Agenda 2030. Agenda 2030 saw explicit commitments on migration being incorporated into global development policy for the first time.

The second is the adoption in December 2018 of the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), a document whose very title is taken from the text of Agenda 2030. The GCM proclaims itself as a milestone in the history of international cooperation on migration, a contentious field where states’ right to control migration and migrants’ human rights often seem to be locked in indissoluble conflict.

But what does the GCM do and will it make any difference to the protection of migrants’ rights?

One of the signature features of Agenda 2030 and the GCM is their status as soft-law documents. This means that neither document imposes binding legal obligations on states. The GCM, the most important international agreement on migrants’ rights since 1990, bundles together some key rights for migrants and gets states to commit to work together to respect these rights.

But do the GCM’s ambitious commitments mean anything if states can’t be compelled to live up to them? Is the non-binding framework created by Agenda 2030 and the GCM just so much lipservice and window-dressing? What dangers lurk in allocating supervision of migrants’ rights protection to non-binding, soft-law arenas? The answers to these questions, and so much more, are to be found in the pages of this Special Issue, written by a group of experts with a combined total of over 150 years’ experience of work in the increasingly important field of migration law and migrants’ rights protection.

A little more about International Migrants Day 18 December is celebrated as International Migrants Day because it was on 18 December 1990 that the international community, through its representatives in the UN General Assembly, adopted the UN Migrant Workers Convention, the most comprehensive treaty dedicated to the protection of migrants’ rights. Unlike the GCM, the UN Migrant Workers Convention imposes binding legal obligations on states that ratify it. Long the subject of multi-level neglect, the Convention is examined in a number of articles in the Special Issue with a view to illustrating its relationship with the GCM and the role it may play in the context of soft-law supervision of migrants’ rights protection.