City Rights United

City Rights United brings together activists and organizations throughout Europe, in a joint project to realize human rights for undocumented citizens in European cities. By putting undocumented citizens to the forefront and improving their situation, we want to expand the human rights to other marginalised groups. The active participation of marginalised groups like undocumented citizens in decision-making is designed not merely as a means to an end but as an end in itself. The normalization of political participation of these groups stimulates civic democracy. The power of making changes locally calls for a union of cities where the knowledge and the movement of progressive initiatives is shared and strengthened.

By collecting and connecting theories, methods, tools and good practices as examples from multiple cities in Europe, we wanted to inspire and strengthen each other. The partners have been sharing their practices during online webinars and the partner meetings organized to set this project up. We organized a big meeting in Naples 2020, which we had to cancel due to COVID-19. It was a struggle to shape the project during COVID-19 times. We found a way to organize webinars with 5 themes, collected by undocumented migrants what their main struggles are in surviving in the city. The webinars were a big success and generated a lot of attention and more people and organizations all over Europe have joined City Rights United. With those people, we split the project in different themes to create output for a toolkit. When we could come together again, we organized a small meeting in Amsterdam , a partner meeting in Hamburg, a creative hackathon in Amsterdam, a meeting in Naples and a big conference in Naples.

The main output of this project is a Toolkit for Inclusive Cities which is a collection of all this knowledge. This Toolkit was launched in April 2022 at a large three-day conference in Utrecht and Amsterdam. For this conference we invited all the stakeholders, politicians, activists etc.. that we can think of to reach the biggest impact possible and make European cities more inclusive. To disseminate the project further, we created podcasts to dive deep into the struggles undocumented migrants face, and which solutions are there that can improve human rights in the cities. The main result was - next to the successful toolkit- that we spoke to many (und) documented migrants in cities all over Europe and we expanded our network much broader than the original partners. We created a community of 50 people in different European cities, who created the toolkit with us.

The partners of City Rights United are partly united in the European project Re:framing migrants in the European Media. Also there are bilateral collaborations and proposals for networks building on the work of City Rights United. Part of the CRU network joined the Comittato 3 Ottobre, Lampedusa for their yearly remembrance of the shipwreck in 2013. The CRU team created some podcast interviews.