Suchergebnisse

This paper starts from the encounter between a European navy vessel and a dinghy carrying boat refugees and other desperate migrants across the Mediterranean or West African Sea towards Europe. It explores the growing trend in the EU of enacting migration control at the high seas or international waters - so-called interdiction. It is argued that these forms of extraterritorial migra-tion control aim at reconquering the efficiency of the sovereign function to control migration, by trying to either deconstruct or shift correlate obligations vis-à-vis refugees and other persecuted persons to third States. In both instances, European States are entering into a sovereignty game, in which creative strategies are developed in order to reassert sovereign power unconstrained by national and international obligations. Starting from an analysis of the refugee regime itself, the paper looks at the possibilities for as-serting human rights extraterritorially, on the high seas, in foreign territorial waters and in relation to situations defined as search and rescue missions. On the basis of this, two interrelated dynamics emerge. The first concerns the legal debate surrounding the criteria for establishing extra-territorial jurisdiction. The so far restrictive interpretations applied provide a context for States to deconstruct protection responsibilities towards refugees by moving migration control outside their sovereign territory and into that of a foreign State. The second dynamic is what could be termed a growing commercialisation of sovereignty for the purpose of migration control. By negotiating access to foreign territorial waters or simply outsource the function of migration control to e.g. North and West African countries, European States are exploiting territorial principles of international law to shift and reduce refugee responsibilities.

When does the refugee encounter the State? The straightforward and traditional answer to this question would be, when arriving at the border and surrendering herself to the authorities uttering the magical word, asylum. Reality, however, only seldom conforms to this picture. Today, the person seeking asylum in the EU is much more likely to encounter the State before reaching the EU border - at the visa consulate, through the EU Immigration Liaison Officers posted at the airports of key migration transit and origin countries, during passage over the Mediterranean where navy vessels are patrolling. Alternatively, the refugee may not meet EU in persona, but through delegation, either in the form of an airline company bound by EU regulations ro carry out migration control or as a third State having in EU cooperation to perform exit border control or provide alternative protection in the region. This paper explores the growing nexus of these external or extraterritorial policies in the developing EU asylum and immigration policv. From a legal perspective, these developments create a number of challenges for ensuring the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. Looking into three contentious areas (extraterritorial jurisdiction, extraterritorial protection and extraterritorial policy implementation) it is argued that the present drive to move migration control and refugee protection outside the EU is becoming a strategic feature of the common EU asylum and immigration policy, in which States are instrumentalising the territorial principles of the present refugee regime to relieve themselves of international legal obligations and institutionalise a new ethos of ''protection lite.

The present paper explores the growing link between EU's migration priorities and its foreign policy agenda. As part of the evolving EU acquis on asylum and immigration issues, particular priority has been given to cooperation with third countries and efforts to extend EU's possibilities for regulating migration flows well beyond its borders. As an emerging foreign policy issue, this paper asks how EU's migration priorities have translated into policies vis-à-vis third countries, what objectives these policies serve, and how this affects EU's overall foreign policy agenda and relations with countries of origin and transit? Using Joseph Nye's conceptualisation of 'hard' and 'soft' power, it is argued that EU is taking on a hegemonic position when initialising cooperation with third countries. As these countries are becoming more reluctant to take upon them the responsibility for preventing migration from reaching Europe, the EU is playing on a combination of 'attraction' and direct conditionality to ensure compliance. Yet, as the stakes are getting higher, ensuring cooperation may prove too costly, both financially and to EU's self-image.

Every year between 100,000 and 120,000 migrants attempt to irregularly cross the Mediterranean to reach European shores in hope of political asylum or just a better life. In this working paper Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tanja Aalberts take on the complicated politics and law of 'rescue at sea', and the legal duty to render assistance to migrants in distress at sea that falls upon all sovereign states. Yet, exactly because this takes in international waters, the precise division and content of this sovereign responsibility remains contested and subject to varying interpretations. As a result, the drowning migrant finds herself subject to an increasingly complex field of governance, in which participating states may successfully barter off and deconstruct responsibility by reference to traditional norms of sovereignty and international law. This working paper is the first in a special series linked to the DIIS research initiative 'Shifting Sovereignties & Power'. The present paper was presented at the first international workshop in this framework titled 'Sovereignty, Territory and Emerging Geopolitics' held at DIIS, 3-4 May 2010

This article examines the political and legal processes through which human rights and migration law have become confounded – what we in this article more generally refer to as regime entanglement. Regime entanglement implies that different areas of law not only interact but are more fundamentally entwined and mutually impacted. Human rights and migration have historically had distinct trajectories in European law and politics, but the recent coupling of the two, we argue, have transformed both. Migration law has gained legal momentum and judicial empowerment from increasingly engaging human rights law and institutions; human rights law has gained legitimacy for its universalist aspirations by developing, albeit slowly, a jurisprudence on non-nationals' rights. Yet, the coupling has also been politically contentious – at times even explosive – which has in turn challenged both fields of law. Although this entanglement is a general European development, the article applies a more situated approach, using Denmark as a case for understanding how these two legal regimes have been implemented and interacted in national law and politics.

Alarming reports on crises are appearing and being published on a daily basis in different expressions from climate change, to people's movement and displacement, to armed conflict. Claims to crisis may involve tangible displays of desperate refugees, civilian casualties or persisting, if not, permanent poverty. Moreover, crisis relates to more abstract concepts such as failing democracy, instability in the liberal world order or national and global economic inequality. Crisis, in a sense, seemingly weaves the contemporary world together (Latour 1993), and this trend is reinforced by the frequent occurrence of mediatized or media-tuned global crisis narratives, many of which are currently shaped by populist apocalyptic ideology (Judis 2016). At the same time, crisis refers to social forces that can disrupt life and frame realities in ways, which go beyond prevalent discursive narratives (Jaques 2009; Smith and Vivekananda 2009). Crisis can also serve as a turning point and an opportunity for transformational change in a system (e.g. Polanyi 1944; Walby 2015). In particular, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to crisis as both concept and event, and thus to crisis studies, that moves away from some tendencies to see crisis as ahistorical, but rather emphasises uncertainty and contingency.