Cathryn Costello, Stefano Zirulia
The CJEU has pending before it a crucial case on the criminalisation of seeking asylum and assistance to those seeking protection. At this critical juncture, this blog post highlights a sample of important decisions in which courts, giving effect to constitutional and international legal principles, set legal limits on this form of criminalisation. These cases reflect not only the appropriate legal limits, but also acknowledge the character of irregular migration and smuggling. Rather than framing individuals as dangerous illegal migrants and exploitative smugglers, they reassert the humanity of both those in search of refuge and opportunity, and those that assist them.
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Catherine Briddick
A few months ago the UK’s Supreme Court held that the Secretary of State’s policy to remove protection seekers to Rwanda to have their claims determined there was unlawful. The British government responded to this decision with a Treaty and Bill that seek to legislate the fiction, or indeed, the falsehood, of Rwanda’s safety. This move demonstrates the fragility of the rule of law, both domestically and internationally. Addressing the latter, this essay shifts focus from domestic challenges to international ones, exploring whether STCs could be contested as ‘forbidden treaties’.
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David Owen
Why are the reasons given in support of the declared aim of the current asylum policies in the UK, EU and USA of breaking the business model of smugglers expressed in humanitarian terms? It is, no doubt, tempting to simply dismiss this humanitarian rhetoric as hypocrisy, as the compliment that vice pays to virtue. Yet however justified that dismissal may be in particular cases, to turn away too quickly from this phenomenon would be to miss something of political significance in its form and to fail to register the historical entanglement of humanitarianism and border externalisation.
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Maximilian Pichl
The year 2023 was not a good year for the rights of asylum seekers. The decision about a new legal framework for the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) was described as a "historic moment" (Ylva Johansson), but in fact works as a programme of disenfranchisement. If the pursuit of progressive positions are blocked in the political arena, actors shift their strategies to the judicial field. Even before the summer of migration 2015, successful legal struggles had a significant impact on European migration policy. Push-backs on the high sea were prohibited and transfers of asylum seekers to inhumane conditions under the Dublin system were prevented. The draft for the new CEAS are characterised by attempts to circumvent the consequences of these judgements. In this blogpost, I will discuss what the future of legal struggles within the framework of the new CEAS might look like.
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Jürgen Bast
Restricting the freedom of movement of unwanted asylum seekers is the conceptual core of the CEAS reform package politically agreed upon by the EU’s legislative institutions in December 2023. Large groups of the people seeking international protection in the EU will be subject to so-called border procedures. Their claims will be processed while being ‘kept at or in proximity to the external border or transit zones’ (Commission proposal) in order to prevent their onward movement and to facilitate ensuing deportations. Introducing such confinement measures will be mandatory for all Member States, provided that an asylum seeker meets certain criteria, in particular a low rate of success of earlier protection claims made by his or her fellow nationals, calculated on an EU-wide average. Why did we fail to make asylum-seekers’ right to free movement relevant in context of the CEAS reform?
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Joyce De Coninck, Giulia Raimondo
This contribution highlights how European border management disrupts conventional state-centric understandings thereof, while fostering impunity for human rights violations in its enforcement. EU borders are increasingly controlled in a supranational fashion by a panoply of different actors with different legal mandates and obligations, expanding within and beyond the physical frontiers of Member States. In addition, new technologies and the political turn to the logic of ‘crisis governance’ are contributing to changing the traditional practice of border controls, with a multiplicy of actors being involved in a complex dynamic of securitization. The actors, practices and the legal framework governing European border controls are rapidly changing; yet underlying linear and territorial assumptions and liability regimes remain unchanged perpetuating serious human rights shortcomings.
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Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova
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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Sarah Ganty, Dimitry Vladimirovich Kochenov
Since 2015, more than 27.500 innocent people died or ‘went missing’ in the Mediterranean. They drowned by themselves thanks to villain smugglers, the Council submits; accountability for the death toll is a complex matter, the Court of Justice finds; besides the geopolitical times are complex – the Commission is right. But what an accident: mare nostrum, a great thoroughfare, turned itself into a racialized grave. Yet, these deaths at EU borders, just as mass abuse and kidnappings by EU-funded and equipped thugs in Libya do not happen by chance. The EU-Belarus border is another locus of torture and violence. All this is a successful implementation of well-designed lawless policies by the Union in collusion with the Member States. In this post, we map key legal techniques deployed by the designers of the EU’s death machine.
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Anja Bossow
2023 was, to put it mildly, a terrible year for (im)migrants and their human rights. With the declared end of the Covid pandemic came an end to the exceptional border policies it had led to which had further restricted already weakened migrants’ rights. Yet governments have largely chosen to replace them with legal frameworks that incorporated many of the same rights negating policies and ideas- except for this time they put them on a permanent legal basis. Liberated from their initial emergency rationales, asylum bans have now joined outsourcing and overpopulated mass detention camps as standard methods of migration governance. What is the role of legal scholarship and discourse at a time where governments seem increasingly comfortable to eschew many long-standing legal rules and norms, often with majority support?
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