De mondiale mobiliteitsinfrastructuur: de dubbele bodem van de neoliberale legaliteit (2020), Sociologie 15(3), p. 333-346
Category: Migrant Deaths Academic
Carrier Sanctions and the Conflicting Legal Obligations of Carriers: Addressing Human Rights Leakage (with Theodore Baird, 2019)
Carrier sanctions, by which transport companies are penalised if they do not refuse embarkation to undocumented persons, play a role in perpetuating harms (denial of refugee protection; death) against migrants. They do so because transport companies are obliged to by legislation of destination states in Europe, North America and Australia. The potential accountability and responsibility of carriers for these harms has not been addressed in literature on human rights law. This article fills this gap through the application of Iris Young’s social connection model to address the contemporary harms of carrier sanctions. We propose that, faced with conflicting legal obligations, carriers have moral and legal obligations to remedy, through strategic actions, the harms to which they contribute. We outline a number of possible practices that carriers can use to do so.
Theodore Baird and Thomas Spijkerboer: Carrier Sanctions and the Conflicting Legal Obligations of Carriers- Addressing Human Rights Leakage, Amsterdam Law Forum 11(2019), 4-19
The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control (2018)
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.
The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control, European Journal of Migration and Law 20(2018), 452-469
Statement by 29 international law academics on Italy seizing the rescue boat Open Arms (2018)
On 29 March, 2018, a group of leading international law academics called for Italy to cease its policy of promoting, directing and enforcing returns to Libya with immediate effect after Italian authorities recently seized the Spanish NGO rescue boat ‘Open Arms’. The academics also called on Italy to cease prosecuting actors who deliver people rescued at sea to a place of safety. They argue that Italy is acting in violation of international law.
On March 18, 2018, the ‘Open Arms’ refused to hand over to the Libyan coast guard 218 people it had rescued in international waters. The Italian authorities initiated criminal investigations against the NGO coordinator and the captain of the boat. And Italy claims that they were obliged to do so, on the basis of the Italian NGO Code of Conduct. Instead, the ‘Open Arms’ brought two rescued persons to Malta (where a mother and child were hospitalized in critical condition), and the remaining to Italy. The NGO people face prosecution on account of taking part in human smuggling (Le Monde, 22 March 2018).
Under international law, shipmasters are under the obligation to assist people in distress at sea, and to bring them to a place of safety. The captain of the ‘Open Arms’ has complied with this requirement by rescuing the 218 people and subsequently refusing to hand them over to the Libyan coast guard. On the basis of well documented human rights reports, the captain knew that handing them to the Libyan coast guard would imply the real risk that the 218 people would be subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, slavery, or forced or compulsory labour, which constitute grave human rights violations or even crimes against humanity. Libya is not a place of safety as required under international law.
The full text of the statement is avaialble here.
Wasted Lives. Borders and the Right to Life of People Crossing Them (2017)
States are obliged to protect the right to life by law. This paper 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 of law shows that states differentiate in protecting the right to life. Regular travelers benefit from extensive positive obligations to safeguard their right to life, whereas the lives of irregularized travelers are protected first and foremost by combating irregularized migration and, if the worst comes to pass, by search and rescue. The right of states to exclude aliens from the their territories leads to exclusion of irregularized travelers from their main positive obligations under the right to life. This situation is analyzed 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.
Wasted Lives. Borders and the Right to Life of People Crossing Them, Nordic Journal of International Law 2017(1), p. 1-29
Deaths at the borders database: evidence of deceased migrants’ bodies found along the southern external borders of the European Union (2017, with Tamara Last and 13 others)
Irregular migrants and asylum seekers have died and continue to die attempting to cross the external borders of the EU without authorisation, seeking to enter the territories of its Member States. Yet, remarkably little is known about these ‘border deaths’. In 2015, the Human Costs of Border Control project published the Deaths at the Borders Database for the Southern EU, an opensource ‘evidence base’ of individualised information about people who have died border deaths between 1990 and 2013, sourced from the death management systems of Spain, Gibraltar, Italy, Malta and Greece. It is the first database on border deaths in the EU to be based on official sources as opposed to the news media. The project involved searching 563 state-run death registry archives and deductively selecting the death certificates of persons who died border deaths. This paper describes, in detail, the making of the Deaths at the Border Database: from the systematic, multi-sited, quantitative data collection and qualitative case studies, to the construction and final results of the Database itself.
Death at the borders database, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (2017), p. 693-712
Fact Check: Did the EU-Turkey Deal Bring Down the Number of Migrants and of Border Deaths? (2016)
On March 18th, 2016, the EU and Turkey agreed that all irregular migrants arriving on the Greek islands were to be returned to Turkey. It is generally believed that this agreement has led to a dramatic decrease of the number of irregular migrants, and hence of the number of border deaths. Exemplifying this idea is this quote from the second progress report of the European Commission on the implementation of the EU-Turkey Agreement: ‘The sharp decrease in the number of irregular migrants and asylum seekers crossing from Turkey to Greece is proof of the Statement’s effectiveness – and in particular, that the business model of smugglers can be broken. The clear message to migrants is that getting on a boat in Turkey, and endangering lives in the process, is not worth the risk given that there is a legal and safe pathway through resettlement.’ Are these claims correct?
See my blogpost on Border Criminologies
Book review: Nicola Perugini & Neve Gordon: The Human Right to Dominate
Book review of Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon: The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press, 2015), in Human Rights Law Review 19(2016), p. 395-401
Deaths at the Borders: Evidence from the Southern External Borders of the EU (2016, with Tamara Last and Orcun Ulusoy)
This paper contains a brief introduction to the Deaths at the Border Database, including methodology, prelimiary outcomes and preliminary policy conclusions.
Deaths at the Borders: Evidence from the Southern External Borders of the EU, published in
HIJRA – La Revue Marocaine de Droit d’Asile et Migration 2016, no. 1
– English version: p. 5-23
– Arabic version: p. 24-36
Research project 2013-2018: Border Policies and Sovereignty. Human rights and the right to life of irregular migrants
At the Vrije Universiteit, we are carrying out a research project about changes in European border policies and migrant deaths since 1990. This document is the research proposal that was funded by NWO (the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research).
Border Policies and Sovereignty. Human rights and the right to life of irregular migrants