PICUM

Access posture

About

The Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) is a Brussels-based network of organizations advocating for the rights of undocumented people in Europe. Words Matter! (March 2017) is a campaign leaflet making the case against calling people “illegal”: being undocumented is an administrative matter, not a crime, in most countries, and the label is dehumanizing, legally inaccurate, and politically loaded. It recommends undocumented or irregular instead, traces institutional usage back to a 1975 UN General Assembly resolution, and renders the terminology in all official EU languages.

On the commons’ source spectrum this is a progressive equity guide — advocacy-organization guidance on what to call people — and, with Human Rights Watch’s guidelines, one of the two migration anchors added to the corpus in June 2026. It is also the corpus’ only European source, a counterweight to the otherwise U.S.-centric corpus.

Readers consulting the archived extraction should know the original is a designed infographic: its multilingual word-map scatters country names through the machine-extracted text. The guidance text itself extracted cleanly.

Access

The leaflet is distributed through PICUM’s Words Matter campaign page (linked above), which was live as of the last check. Host posture is private-mirror-link-out: the commons keeps a private preservation copy for citation verification and links readers to PICUM’s authoritative version. Quotes are held within fair-use limits.