The EU’s Eastern Border and Inconvenient Truths
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, alongside with the EU’s confrontation with Russia’s ally Belarus, however, has deeply impacted the securitisation of migration within the EU. Highly politicised conflict-related securitisation narratives have rarely found their way so swiftly into Member States’ domestic migration and asylum laws, leading to open and far-reaching violations of EU and international human rights law. Hardly ever before have ill-defined concepts and indiscriminate assumptions been so broadly accepted and used to shift from an individual-focused approach to blanket measures stigmatising, dehumanising and excluding entire groups. And rarely before have radical changes of this kind received so little criticism - a deeply unsettling and dangerous trend.
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Scottish Independence on Hold
The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the Scottish Government does not have the power to call a new referendum on independence, blocking the SNP administration's apparent plans for a non-binding referendum in October next year. The ruling confirms the inability of Scotland's politics to resolve constitutional issues as it currently established. Politics will follow, but there is no clearer route to resolving the constitutional issues at play now than before the ruling.
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The Ogiek Struggle for Recognition in Kenya
In a judgment handed down in Arusha on 23rd June 2022, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) affirmed its 2017 ruling that the Ogiek people are indigenous to the Mau Forest and that they are its ancestral owners, granting them a collective title to be achieved through delimitation, demarcation and registration of their land. The reasoning by the Court will have a significant bearing on the struggles of other indigenous peoples seeking to secure their land and livelihoods.
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