How International Multilateral Treaties Shape the Singapore State

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Introduction

This essay aims to look at how international multilateral treaties shape the Singapore State discourse on protecting the rights for migrant workers, specifically Foreign Domestic Workers (FDW) from a perspective of maintaining state sovereignty in controlling migrant flows to a more humanitarian view of FDWs as a vulnerable group to exploitation and trafficking. I would conclude that recently, the international community succeeds in pressurising Singapore State to start making some efforts to ensure FDW righFramework

Finnermore (1996) argued that UN create norms and legitimised actors to engage in multilateralism for humanitarian intervention. I borrowed his framework of analysing how international community as a collective actor, Singapore State as the state actor, share different norms and values, have differing interests. Hence, they behave and impact FDW rights differently.

Significance of this essay to the concept of Global Governance

Koser argued that states often try to solve migration issues on a "unilateral approach" that is unproductive. International consensus on migrant workers rights are difficult to achieve as many states refuse to ratify conventions as the conventions "contradicts or adds no value to existing national migration laws." (Koser, 2010, pp. 301--315) Hollifield built upon Ruggie's argument (Ruggie, 2002 cited in Hollifield, 2000) that multilateralism will only work wh...

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...&mtdsg_no=IV-13&chapter=4&lang=en [Accessed: 8 Apr 2014].

UN. 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [online] Available at: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ [Accessed: 8 Apr 2014].

Unodc.org. 2014. Signatories to the CTOC Trafficking Protocol. [online] Available at: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/CTOC/countrylist-traffickingprotocol.html [Accessed: 8 Apr 2014].

Varia, N. 2005. Singapore. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch.

Www2.ohchr.org. 1990. International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. [online] Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cmw/cmw.htm [Accessed: 8 Apr 2014].

Yeoh, B. S., Huang, S. and Gonzalez III, J. 1999. Migrant female domestic workers: debating the economic, social and political impacts in Singapore. International Migration Review, pp. 114--136.

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