The EU Humanitarian Border and the Securitization of Human Rights: The 'Rescue-Through-Interdiction/Rescue-Without- Protection' Paradigm (JCMS 2017) (original) (raw)
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2012
The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), created in 1992 and directed by Stefano Bartolini since September 2006, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research and to promote work on the major issues facing the process of integration and European society. The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes and projects, and a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration and the expanding membership of the European Union.
Maritime borders in the Central Mediterranean Search and Rescue and access to asylum
Anales de Derecho, 2023
The article argues that the border for migrants in the Central Mediterranean can only be identified by intertwining provisions of international maritime law and international humanitarian norms to find that the border is shifted on board of the boats that perform Search and Rescue (SAR) or Interdiction Operations regardless of their position on the map and of the official borders created by International Treaties. By highlighting the discrepancy between the restrictive political/operational trends and the legal commitment towards search and rescue and maritime borders, this article demonstrates how European human rights jurisprudence on search and rescue and non-refoulement shaped the European response at sea and determined the shifting of maritime borders on board of the boats performing rescues or interceptions. As a consequence, this explains the criminalization of SAR NGOs, which become unwanted border outposts at Sea.
This article sets out two case studies to examine the evolving reality of 'boat migration' and the intersecting legal frameworks at play. Our analysis takes a systemic integration approach to reflect on the complex dynamics underpinning responses to the phenomenon in Australia and the Central Mediterranean. The regime that governments purport to act under in any given instance reflects the way they choose to frame incidents and possibly exploit legal gaps in, or contested interpretations of, the relevant rules. The 'closed ports' strategy adopted by Italy and Malta against the MV Lifeline and the detention-at-sea policy pursued by Australia are investigated from the competing perspectives of what we call the 'security lens' and the 'humanitarian lens' to demonstrate how a good faith interpretation of the applicable (if apparently conflicting and overlapping) norms can (and should) be mobilized to save lives, and how that goal is unduly undercut when security concerns trump humanitarian interests.
Migration Policy in Crisis, 2018
This chapter investigates the process of the so-called humanitarian securitization, focusing on dynamics between humanitarian and security-oriented rhetoric and policy actions embedded in the EU policy frames produced in response to the 2015 “migration crisis”. In doing so, it focuses on the nature of the humanitarian framing of the crisis within the EU policy discourse and its relation to the development of operational and militarized responses (i.e. EUNAVFOR Sophia, Frontex border operations) to increased migratory flows. The chapter centres predominantly on the Mediterranean border of the EU, which, given its dangerous nature of irregular border crossing and the number of fatalities, occupies the central role in conceptualization of the humanitarian features of the “migration crisis”. In this approach the chapter does not focus humanitarianism and security as opposite or mutually exclusive, but concentrates on the way these two logics coincide and intertwine in the framing process. In this respect, the chapter contributes to less-studied branch of securitization, showing how human referent object and the idea of humanitarianism have been utilized and gradually marginalized in the conceptualization of remedial actions towards the crisis, changing the nature of the EU’s operations in the Mediterranean from “search and rescue” to “seek and destroy”.
This chapter grapples with the vexed issue of protection at sea, unpacking destination States’ practices of interdiction and their justification on purported humanitarian grounds. It problematizes the instrumentalization of rescue, based on the supposed benevolent effect of ‘stopping the boats’ as a means to ‘save lives’. Two competing yet complementary dynamics are detected and critiqued. First, while destination States inflate their policing competence through reliance on rescue rhetoric and intervene beyond prerogatives explicitly recognized in the law of the sea, they tend to maintain minimalistic constructions of the associated concepts of ‘distress’ or ‘place of safety’ to reduce the scope of their legal responsibilities. Thus, secondly, they deflate their rescue duties and detach them from related international protection obligations, either by deflecting them to third countries or by negating them altogether. Drawing on examples from the US Caribbean interdiction programme, the Australian ‘Pacific Strategy’, and the mare clausum approach favoured in the Mediterranean, the chapter traces the shift from direct to indirect forms of interdiction, increasingly performed by third countries or private actors, culminating in practices of interdiction by omission, which not only tolerate, but purposively embed, the risk of death as part of the migration control toolbox of destination States. The final effect is one that paradoxically transforms rescue into an interdiction tool, denying access to asylum for ‘boat migrants’.
European Journal of Migration and Law, 2010
During the past few years the border waters between Europe and Africa have become an EU-policy crucible. In the midst of the tightening of EU border controls and refugee protection claims, supranational, national and local actors fi nd themselves in a phase of legal insecurity and negotiation. Th is article is based on ethnographical research carried out in Libya, Italy and Malta. It sheds light on the diff erent actors' practices at sea and in the surrounding border region. It also explores how new parameters for refugee protection are emerging in the border regions of the European Union. Th e article argues that the policy practices of the co-operation between Italy and Libya as well as the informal operational methods carried out in the Mediterranean Sea function as a trailblazer of the overall EU refugee policy. In the long term, some of these practices will aff ect and change the legal basis and the formal regulations of the European refugee regime. Th e principle of non-refoulement could fi rst be undermined and then abolished in this process. Using an approach that combines the empirical study of border regions with a legal anthropological perspective, the article analyses the Union's processes of change and decision-making on local, national and supranational levels and their interconnections.
The refugee, the sovereign and the sea: EU interdiction policies in the Mediterranean PDF Logo
2008
Price: DKK 25.00 (VAT included) DIIS publications can be downloaded free of charge from www.diis.dk DIIS Working Papers make available DIIS researchers' and DIIS project partners' work in progress towards proper publishing. They may include important documentation which is not necessarily published elsewhere. DIIS Working Papers are published under the responsibility of the author alone. DIIS Working Papers should not be quoted without the express permission of the author. This working paper is an early version of a chapter that will be published as part of Rebecca
American Behavioral Scientist, 2019
The Central Mediterranean is the most deadly body of water in the Mediterranean Sea with at least 15,062 fatalities recorded by International Organization of Migration between 2014 and 2018. This article aims at highlighting the rise of a variety of new civil society actors engaged in the rescue of people undertaking dangerous journeys across the sea in the attempt of reaching the southern European shores. The peculiarity of the humanitarian space at sea and its political relevance are pointed out to illustrate the unfolding of the maritime border management on the Central Mediterranean route and its relation with the activity of the civil society rescue vessels. The theoretical aspiration of the article is to question the role of a proactive civil humanitarianism at sea, discussing the emergence of different political and social meanings around humanitarianism at the EU's southern maritime border. In recent years, the increasing presence of new citizens-based organizations at sea challenges the nexus between humanitarian and emergency approaches adopted to implement security-oriented policies. This essay draws on the findings of a broader comparative work on a variety of civil society actors engaged in the search and rescue operations on the maritime route between Libya and Europe, focusing in particular on Italy as country of first arrival. The fieldwork covers a period of time going between 2016 and 2018. The research methodology is built on a multisited ethnography, the conduct of semidirective and informal interviews with both state and nonstate actors, and the analysis of various reports unraveling the social and political tensions around rescue at sea on the Central Mediterranean route.
Stopping boats, saving lives, securing subjects: Humanitarian borders in Europe and Australia
European Journal of International Relations, 2017
In April 2015, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called on European leaders to respond to the migration and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean by 'stopping the boats' in order to prevent further deaths. This suggestion resonated with the European Union Commission's newly articulated commitment to both enhancing border security and saving lives. This article charts the increasing entanglement of securitisation and humanitarianism in the context of transnational border control and migration management. The analysis traces the global phenomenon of humanitarian border security alongside a series of spatial dislocations and temporal deferrals of 'the border' in both European and Australian contexts. While discourses of humanitarian borders operate according to a purportedly universal and therefore borderless logic of 'saving lives', the subjectivity of the 'irregular' migrant in need of rescue is one that is produced as spatially and temporally exceptional-the imperative is always to act in the here and the now-and therefore knowable, governable and 'bordered'.