Suchergebnisse

In the past 25 years, European migration policy has been externalized, resulting in a bifurcation of human movement. This has become clearly visible in the context of Syrian refugees. In two judgments, the EU Court of Justice was confronted with cases challenging the exclusion of Syrian refugees from Europe. This article seeks to analyse these judgments in the context of the broader developments in European migration law and policy. The core analysis developed here is that the bifurcation of human movement is reflected in a bifurcation of law. Excluded people are to be excluded not merely from European territory, but also from European law.

Since the end of the Cold War, migration law and policy of the global North has been characterised by externalisation, privatisation and securitisation. These developments have been conceptualised as denying access to migrants and as politics of non-entrée. This article proposes to broaden the analysis, and to analyse unwanted migration as merely one form of international human mobility by relying on the concept of the global mobility infrastructure. The global mobility infrastructure consists of the physical structures, services and laws that enable some people to move across the globe with high speed, low risk, and at low cost. People who have no access to it travel slowly, with high risk and at high cost. Within the global mobility infrastructure, travellers benefit from advanced forms of international law. For the excluded, international law reflects and embodies their exclusion before, during and after their travel to the global North. Exclusion is based on nationality, race, class and gender. The notion of the global mobility infrastructure allows for questioning the way in which international law reproduces these forms of stratification.

States are obliged to protect the right to life by law. This article analyses the way in which states do this in the field of aviation law, maritime law and the law on migrant smuggling. A comparative description of these fields shows that states differentiate in protecting the right to life. Regular travellers benefit from extensive positive obligations to safeguard their right to life, whereas the lives of irregularised travellers are protected first and foremost by combating irregularised migration and, if the worst comes to pass, by search and rescue. The right of states to exclude aliens from their territories leads to exclusion of irregularised travellers from their main positive obligations under the right to life. This situation is analysed through Zygmunt Bauman's notion of 'wasted lives'. The contrast with aviation and maritime law makes clear that this situation is the outcome of human choice, which can be changed.