03 August 2026
Ceuta at the Fault Lines of European Solidarity
On Friday morning, Europeans woke up to unsettling news. Within 24 hours, approximately 60,000 migrants successfully managed to reach the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, and several dozen have been reported dead in the attempt to swim across the border. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has ordered the military to support the Civil Guard on the ground. What caused this sudden influx? Does EU law offer the procedures and mechanisms to respond to the spontaneous arrival of such large numbers of people? And what do these events reveal about the internal functioning of the EU’s migration and asylum regime and solidarity between Member States? Continue reading >>
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20 December 2023
A Duty to Rescue
Reports of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean have, unfortunately, become more and more frequent in recent years. A recently published MSF report has highlighted the role ‘pushbacks and systematic non-assistance to those at risk of drowning proliferate’ play in this regard. The report refers specifically to two events that happened in 2023 in which national authorities failed to launch rescue operations despite receiving the information on migrants in distress at sea hours before the tragedy. In this blogpost, we assess whether a coast guard’s failure to act in situations of migrants in distress might violate an incumbent criminal law duty to rescue. We map the core elements of the duty to rescue under criminal law and how they might apply to such a chain of events, using the abovementioned event of 14 June as an example. Continue reading >>
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