5 - Mental Health, Irregular Migration and Human Rights

Summary

This chapter evaluates what the international and European human rights frameworks can offer, in terms of standard setting and avenues for international legal development and protection, to those irregular migrants who experience either mental health difficulties or have a psychosocial disability. The analysis in this chapter extends the normative frames of references to encompass ‘disability’, which is reconceptualised in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a transformative status and a human rights argument. This chapter triangulates human rights, public health and disability-sensitive arguments to assess the relations between mental health and human rights in the context of irregular migration in human rights law and jurisprudence. While the European Court of Human Rights’ deportation cases concerning people with mental health issues tend to reflect an overall emergency-oriented and predominantly biomedical approach to mental health, several UN human rights treaty bodies set out a more holistic conceptualisation of mental health and psychosocial disability. The latter approach promotes non-discriminatory psychosocial interventions to guarantee access to community-based mental health care services and the underlying determinants of mental health for everyone regardless of migration status.