Over the last few decades, both the European Union and European States have been implementing various strategies to externalize border controls with the declared intent of saving human lives and countering smuggling but with the actual end result of shifting borders, circumventing international obligations and ultimately preventing access to Europe. What has been principally deplored is the fact that externalizing border controls risks creating ‘legal black holes’. Furthermore, what is particularly worrying in the current European debate is the intensification of this practice by multiple arrangements with unsafe third countries, exposing migrants and asylum seekers to serious human rights violations. This book explores whether European States can succeed in shifting their responsibility onto Third States in cases of human rights violations. Focusing, in particular, on the 2017 Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding, the book investigates the possible basis for triggering the responsibility of outsourcing States. The second part of the book examines how the Italy-Libya MoU is only a small part of a broader scenario, exploring EU policies of externalization. A brief overview of the recent decisions of the EU Court vis-à-vis two aspects of externalization (the EU-Turkey statement and the issue of humanitarian visas) will pave the way for the conclusions since, in the author’s view, the current attitude of the Luxembourg Court confirms the importance of focusing on the responsibility of European States and the urgent need to investigate the possibility of bringing a claim against the outsourcing States before the Court of Strasbourg. Offering a new perspective on an extremely topical subject, this book will appeal to students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in European Law, International Law, Migration and Human Rights.

The extension of border controls beyond a country’s territory to regulate the flows of migrants before they arrive has become a popular and highly controversial policy practice. Today, remote control policies are more visible, complex and widespread than ever before, raising various ethical, political and legal issues for the governments promoting them. The book examines the externalization of migration control from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, focusing on ‘remote control’ initiatives in Europe and North America, with contributions from the fields of politics, sociology, law, geography, anthropology, and history. This book uses empirically rich analyses and compelling theoretical insights to trace the evolution of ‘remote control’ initiatives and assesses their impact and policy implications. It also explores competing theoretical models that might explain their emergence and diffusion. Individual chapters tackle some of the most puzzling questions underlying remote control policies, such as the reasons why governments adopt these policies and what might be their impact on migrants and other actors involved.

This edited volume examines the extent to which the various authorities and actors currently performing border management and expulsion-related tasks are subject to accountability mechanisms capable of delivering effective remedies and justice for abuses suffered by migrants and asylum seekers. Member states of the European Union and State Parties to the Council of Europe are under the obligation to establish complaint mechanisms allowing immigrants and/or asylum seekers to seek effective remedies in cases where their rights are violated. This book sheds light on the complaint bodies and procedures existing and available in Austria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Romania. It assesses their role in overseeing, investigating, and redressing cases of human rights violations deriving from violent border and immigration management practices, and expedited expulsion procedures. This book therefore provides an assessment of the practical, legal, and procedural challenges that affect the possibility to lodge complaints and access remedies for human rights violations suffered at the hands of the law enforcement authorities and other security actors operating at land, air, and sea borders, or participating in expulsions procedures – in particular, joint return flights. The volume will be of key interest to students, scholars, and practitioners working on human rights, migration and borders, international law, European law and security studies, EU politics, and more broadly, international relations.

This book analyses the dominant imagery related to migration and illustrates how framing of migrants as subjects viewed through the lens of the host gaze positions them for exclusion and marginalisation. It focuses on comparative sources derived from public and media visual campaigns focusing on migration issues. It illustrates how the ethical gap that the host-centric way of looking creates results in the growing suspicion of the migrant and how this ethical gap broadens and impacts on the legal exclusion of migrants as legal subjects.

This work analyses the legal challenges posed by contemporary practices of extraterritorial immigration control: visas, pre-embarkation checks and the interception of irregular migrants. It examines the international law framework, and provides case-studies from Europe, Australia and the United States.

This book traces the practices of migration control and its contestation in the European migration regime in times of intense politicization. The collaboratively written work brings together the perspectives of state agents, NGOs, migrants with precarious legal status, and their support networks, collected through multi-sited fieldwork in eight European states: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. The book provides knowledge of how European migration law is implemented, used, and challenged by different actors, and of how it lends and constrains power over migrants’ journeys and prospects. An ethnography of law in action, the book contributes to socio-legal scholarship on migration control at the margins of the state. “This book is a major achievement. A remarkable and insightful study that through close analysis of the practices of migration control in 8 European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland) provides powerful new insight into the power of the state at its margins and over those that are marginalised.” - Andrew Geddes, Director, Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute “Migrants Before the Law provides a much-needed account of the dizzying legal labyrinth that migrants navigate as they seek to survive in Europe. Based on multi-sited ethnography in detention centres, migration offices, police stations, and non-governmental organizations as well as on interviews with key government actors, advocates, and migrants themselves, this book explores the systems of control and forms of migrant precarity that operate along Europe’s internal borders, in multiple national and transnational contexts. Readers will come away with a deepened understanding of the perverse workings of power, the ways that the uncertainty and unpredictability of law foster both despair and hope, the degree to which the immigration “crisis” is both manufactured and experienced as real, and the ingenuity of migrants themselves in the face of Kafkaesque state practices.” - Susan Bibler Coutin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, USA “Migrants Before the Law is an excellent exposition of the dispersed sites of the law and the hinges and junctions through which this apparatus is actualized in the lives of migrants facing deportation, contesting their status as illegal migrants or seeking to regularize their precarious position. Written with great sensitivity and an eye to minute details this book is also an achievement in furthering the method of collaborative ethnography and new ways of staging comparisons.” - Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, USA

This volume explores the digitization, privatization, and spatial displacement of border security and the effects these have on political accountability and migrant rights. The governance of security and migration is unfolding in new political spaces. Cooperation and competition among immigration officials, border guards, transnational security corporations, IT companies, local police, and international organizations has decoupled migration governance from national political structures. The chapters in the volume examine how these dynamics affect the deployment and constraint of sovereign power in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the EU. Contributors trace this process from the disciplinary perspectives of law, political science, sociology, criminology, and geography. Part I of the book explores the reconfiguration of security and migration governance through historical processes of privatization, digitization, and the rescaling of border control technologies to local and global spaces. Part II explores how migrant rights actors have responded by rescaling resistance to global and local levels. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, global governance, migration studies, and international relations.