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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Constitutional Identity vs. Human Rights
In two recent Latvian cases concerning the Russian-speaking minority decided respectively in September and November 2023, the ECtHR made clear that protection of constitutional identity has now been elevated to a legitimate aim for a differential treatment under the Convention. This post explores how the protection of constitutional identity has been deployed to enable a collective punishment by association with a former occupier, and how the ECtHR’s reasoning has effectively endorsed such a punishment, which is unbefitting of a liberal democratic system the ECHR aspires to represent. Until the three cases were decided, no liberal European democracy could argue without losing face that suppressing a large proportion of its population was its constitutional identity – one of the goals of its statehood. Today, this claim is seemingly kosher, marking a U-turn in the understanding of what the European human rights protection system is for minorities in Europe.
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Migrant Instrumentalisation: Facts and Fictions
The last two years have seen recurring efforts to introduce the concept of instrumentalisation of migration into EU asylum law on a permanent basis. This post will demonstrate why the ‘instrumentalisation of migration’ is an overly simplified and generalised term that does not capture the complexities of the situation on the ground. Its adoption into EU asylum law thus threatens both to undermine legal certainty and bear far-reaching consequences for the Rule of Law in the EU.
Continue reading >>Challenging the ‘Post-Soviet’ Label and Colonial Mindsets
The international discourse long depended on the term ‘post-Soviet’ to refer to the 15 sovereign states that emerged and re-emerged from the Soviet Union following its dissolution in 1991. The list includes European and Asian countries with contrasting backgrounds. Rooted in the context of the Cold War, the term fails to capture the crucial ongoing metamorphosis and challenges of these states for the past thirty years. For Lithuania and the Baltic region at least, the NATO Summit in Vilnius in July 2023 is a chance to emphasize the strong European identity and to challenge the deep colonial mindsets, which overlooks Eastern European perspectives in favor of those built in Moscow since the beginning of the 20th century.
Continue reading >>No Rainbow without Rain?
On 6 December 2022, Latvian National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP) revoked the broadcasting licence of the independent Russian TV channel ‘TV Rain’. The measures taken against TV Rain in Latvia raise intricate legal questions from an EU law point of view: Is the crackdown on the anti-war Russian TV channel compatible with EU-wide rules on audiovisual media? Can the Latvian government lawfully request YouTube to make TV rain’s channel inaccessible in Latvia? This blogpost argues that EU law is powerless when confronted with possibly unjustified national restrictions against media outlets and their growing spillover into the Internet sphere.
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Seven Months in the Freezing Forest
On 10 November 2022, Latvia extended the emergency situation at its border with Belarus for a further three months – now until February 2023. Introduced in August 2021 in response to the perceived ‘hybrid attack’ organised by Minsk, the state of emergency has since been renewed five times, effectively becoming a permanent condition. In practical terms that means that Latvia will continue carrying out systematic pushbacks – despite the very low number of border crossing attempts and allegations of gross violations of human rights.
Continue reading >>The COVID-19 Crisis in Latvia
The government response to COVID-19 in Latvia can be characterised as one of legal caution. Even though successive states of emergency have been used to manage the crisis, adequate parliamentary and judicial oversight has resulted in broadly proportional handling of the pandemic.
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