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Coloniality and Recent European Migration Case Law (2022)

This article interrogates European law as actively contributing to the undermining of migrants’ rights, since its inception. It claims that European case law in the area of migration is a continuation of a pre-existing characteristic: the tendency to privilege the interests of European states over those of migrants and of Europeans with transnational ties. The chapter thus examines the hypothesis that current-day migrants, being people from former European colonies, are subjected to a split form of legality that was perfected at the end of the colonial era. The legal system maintains the pretence of equality before the law while at the same time relegating colonial subjects to sub-standard legal protection by either excluding them from the application of human rights standards altogether or by lowering these standards. In addition to these two elements, a third legal governance technique with its origins in colonialism is the use of emergency powers themselves. Coloniality thus remains a structuring element of human rights law as it responds to migration. Naming and exposing this colonial structure may be helpful to the extent that it makes a legal and political critique possible, in addition to helping actors to navigate the field.

Coloniality and Recent European Migration Case Law, in Vladislava Stoyanova and Stijn Smets (eds), Migrants’ Rights, Populism and Legal Resilience in Europe, Cambridge University Press 2022, 117-138

Wissem Ben Hassin: Untitled (2018). Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Tunis; Collection of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs

Ik zie ik zie wat ik niet zie: Etnisch profileren en structurele rassendiscriminatie in het migratierecht (met Karin de Vries, 2022)

Hoewel de KMar inmiddels heeft laten weten niet door te zullen gaan met etnisch profileren in het kader van MTV-controles, is zulk profileren volgens de Nederlandse rechter niet in strijd met internationale discriminatieverboden. Dat strookt echter niet met de rechtspraak van het EHRM: als huidskleur, ook al is dat in een optelsom van criteria, beslissend is voor de vraag of iemand wordt staande gehouden is er steeds sprake van een onderscheid in strijd met artikel 1 Protocol 12 EVRM. Tegelijkertijd valt niet te ontkennen dat ras historisch steeds in grote mate bepalend is geweest, en nog steeds is, voor het antwoord op de vraag wie zich relatief vrij over de wereld kan bewegen, en wie niet. Die ongelijke toegang tot legale migratie komt voort uit het koloniale verleden en heeft tot gevolg dat mensen zonder rechtmatig verblijf vooral mensen van kleur zijn. Het verbod om expliciet onderscheid te maken op grond van ras maakt het echter onmogelijk om het structurele verband tussen huidskleur en verblijfsstatus juridisch te erkennen

Ik zie ik zie wat ik niet zie: Etnisch profileren en structurele rassendiscriminatie in het migratierecht, Nederlands Juristenblad 25 februari 2022, 549-555

Migration management clientelism: Europe’s migration funds as a global political project (2022)

In response to the 2015 migration ‘crisis’, the European Union intensified the externalisation of its migration policies, in particular through the EU Trust Funds for Syria and Africa, and the Facility for Refugees in Turkey. The legal construction of these financial measures is such that in many projects, normal implementation and public procurement procedures are not applied. This creates opportunities for clientelism. A limited number of actors (Europe’s ‘clients’) has emerged to implement European policies in third countries. This way of implementing externalisation projects will first be analysed in functionalist terms and in terms of path dependency. The paper will conclude by arguing that, in addition to such analyses, this way of implementing externalisation is to be understood as (a) expanding the scope of legitimate action of European states outside their territory; and (b) setting norms for international actors such as non-European states, international organisations and corporations.

Migration Management Clientelism. Europe’s migration funds as a global political project, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48(2022)12, 2892-2907

Race and the regulation of international migration. The ongoing impact of colonialism in the case law of The European Court of Human Rights (with Karin de Vries, 2021)

In the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) the right of States to control migration is firmly established despite strong indications that the effects of migration control are not racially neutral. In this article we attempt to understand how it is possible that the doctrine of sovereign migration control is not considered to breach the prohibition of racial discrimination. We argue that the ECtHR’s approach to migration and racial discrimination fits a pattern in the historical development of migration law whereby the right to travel, and the power of States to restrict this right, have been consistently defined in such a way as to protect the interests of the predominantly white population of today’s global North. Hence, the ease with which the racialised impact of migration control is accepted as normal and compatible with the prohibition of racial discrimination is consistent with migration law’s long history as part of colonial and postcolonial relations.

Race and the regulation of international migration. The ongoing impact of colonialism in the case law of The European Court of Human Rights, Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 39(2021)4, 291-307

Migration Emergencies in the European Postcolony (2021)

This interview, by Lea Espinoza Garrido, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Birgit Spengler and Julia Wewior, focuses on the legal concept of emergency in current European migration law. In its interest in colonial legacies, this conversation overlaps with some of the double issue’s articles – most notably those by Eichinger, Espinoza Garrido, Sarkowsky, Wewior and Wilton. Yet the interview also offers a unique focus on the colonial legacy of European case law. The interviewee, Thomas Spijkerboer, critiques the European legal tradition’s thinking about the state of exception (Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben). He argues that merely building on this tradition runs the risk of erasing the racial specificity which may be hidden, but is, in fact, crucial to the legal concept of emergency, especially in the context of discussing current migrant emergencies. In order to avoid this erasure, Spijkerboer draws on Achille Mbembe, one of the most prominent contemporary thinkers of (and from) the postcolony, to foreground that which is so easily lost in current discussions of European migration law: the role that race plays in the organisation of freedom within liberalism and the insight that modern techniques of legal pluralism are deeply rooted in the history of colonial rule.

Migration Emergencies in the European Postcolony: an Interview with Thomas Spijkerboer, Parallax 2021(27)2, 223-239

The geopolitics of knowledge production in international migration law (2021)

This chapter addresses the involvement of academic research on international migration law in the political project of the global North to impose its view concerning international migration law on the global South. The purportedly well-established principle of international law that states have the right exclude foreigners has its origins in the US Supreme Court’s Chinese Exclusion case law. The doctrine holding that the right of exclusion is inherent in state sovereignty developed there has been adopted and transformed by the European Court of Human Rights. In order to show the continuing relevance of the Chinese Exclusion doctrine, I will analyse a rather everyday judgment of the European Court about boat people (J.R. et autres v Grèce 2018).  This will be contrasted with a judgment about boat people from the global South, issued by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Supreme Court of Justice (Namah v Pato 2016). I will then show how the PNG judgment, and law from the global South more generally, is sidelined in academic work, while Strasbourg judgments are treated as embodying the state of international law (even when they are being criticised). I will analyse this as an act of power erasing sources of international migration law from the global South. As an example, I include bibliometrics on the International Journal of Refugee Law. I will close by showing that this erasure can be, and actually is being resisted within the discipline of international law.

The geopolitics of knowledge production in international migration law,
in Catherine Dauvergne (ed), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration, Cheltenham/Northampton: Edward Elgar 2021, p. 172-188 Download