E/CN.4/2001/83/Add.1 page 23 Civil society 90. The Special Rapporteur wishes to thank the NGOs for the support she received throughout her visit and, in particular, for the arrangements they made for interviews with several individuals in each of the cities she visited. After sifting through all the material, the Special Rapporteur wishes to encourage the NGOs to continue providing advice, information and protection to migrants. In practice, she suggests that they should strengthen their positions and become directly involved with detained or undocumented migrants, while seeking to combine their efforts in the struggle to defend the human rights of migrants. 91. The Special Rapporteur recommends that NGOs support the migrants themselves and seek their involvement so that they can speak for themselves in defence of their rights. 92. The Special Rapporteur suggests that they should continue trying to develop joint programmes with the Government - for example, directed against racism, xenophobia and racial discrimination. She suggests that they should not stop at complaints and that openings should be sought for dialogue in the development of these policies. 93. With regard to the universities, the Special Rapporteur would encourage them to venture beyond pure theoretical research and to involve students in research programmes on the human rights of migrants. Migrants 94. While she is aware from personal experience of the difficulty of taking such action in practice, the Special Rapporteur encourages the migrants themselves to continue to report abuses, especially domestic workers and temporary workers, in order to ensure that programmes operate in practice as intended. 95. The Special Rapporteur recommends that the Government, civil society and the migrants themselves should combine their efforts to combat the trafficking of persons and abuse perpetrated by those who try to take advantage of the vulnerable, not to say precarious, situation in which the migrants find themselves. 96. Lastly, in view of the dynamics of migration in Canada, the Special Rapporteur draws attention to the desirability, for the Government, the authorities, civil society, NGOs, the migrants themselves, the universities and churches, of avoiding polarized attitudes - good versus evil, friends versus enemies; they should instead share responsibility for defending the human rights of the persons we are concerned with, especially the victims of human trafficking. Shared responsibility is a fundamental element in countering this type of human rights violation. This shared responsibility must include both the receiving countries and the countries of origin or transit, at all the levels mentioned above. Whenever this complex dynamic process becomes polarized, the effect is to leave victims uninformed and isolated and to open the way to human rights violations. -----

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