The asylum system, migrant networks and the Informal labour market

Governments attempting to regulate labour markets and control immigration are confronted with difficult questions. In the past, there was general agreement that the asylum system should not be exploited as a side entrance to the labour market. The two systems—asylum and labour market—were to be planned and maintained separately. But if migration is a prerequisite for asylum, does not increasingly stiffer migration control block escape for those under persecution? Prices for smuggling go up, and smugglers seek new routes, yet irregular migration continues, and the informal labour market flourishes. Here we must ask an irreverent question: is there any point in having both systems? And can the crux of the matter be that both are repeatedly branded as an ‘illegal’ phenomena which must be ‘battled’ like enemies? This contribution asks whether the asylum system a way to regulate the informal labour market within the EU

The insecurity of trafficking in international law

The present chapter inquires into to the definition of trafficking in the 2000 Trafficking Protocol. The concept of trafficking seems to offer a self-evident point of departure to broach inequality and migration in the international domain. It emphasises the inequality between trafficker and the trafficked person, and States task themselves to side with the latter - and weaker - party in that relationship. Other dimensions of inequality, as that between migrants and States, are removed from the limelight of trafficking language. Trafficking of human beings is distinct from human smuggling: while trafficking is about non-consensual and exploitative relations between the migrant and a trafficker, smuggling is based on a consensus amongst the parties involved in an illegal border transgression. The chapter shall explore in detail how the concept of trafficking is constructed in instruments of international law. A particular focus will be on the use of human rights to legitimize the trafficking concept. My intention is to show that this use is selective

Prisoners' Dilemma in Fortress Europe. On the Prospects of Burden Sharing in the European Union

This text aims at exploring the relationship between a more equitable sharing of the responsibility for protection seekers and the normative framework on refugees and immigration already existing in Europe

Securitising sovereignty? States, refugees, and the regionalisation of international law

At first sight, international law seems to uphold both state sovereignty and individual sovereignty. The existence and autonomy of a state are secured by the obligation on other states to respect its territorial integrity and the prohibition on intervening in other states’ domestic affairs. At the individual level, internationally guaranteed human rights serve comparable functions: they secure a minimum of autonomy and even preserve an ‘‘exit’’ option, because each individual retains a right to leave any country, including his or her own

Understanding Refugee Law in an Enlarged European Union Theory

The present article seeks to explore how asylum law is formed, transformed and reformed in Europe, what its effects are on state practice and refugee protection in the Baltic and Central European candidate countries, and what this process reveals about the framework used by scholars to understand the dynamics of international refugee law. Arguably, an exclusive focus on EU institutions and their dissemination of regional and international norms among candidate countries through the acquis communitaire is misleading. Looking at the subregional interplay between Vienna and Budapest, Berlin and Warsaw, Copenhagen and Vilnius provides a richer understanding of the emergence of norms than the standard narrative of a Brussels dictate. Hence, to capture these dynamics, we will attempt to expand the framework of analysis by incorporating sub-regional settings, cutting across the divide between old and new Members, and by analysing the repercussions sent out by domestic legislation within these settings. While acknowledging that bilateral and multilateral relations are continuously interwoven, we conclude that bilateralism accounts for a greater degree of normative development and proliferation than multilateralism at EU level, and that domestic legislation as formed by sub-regional dynamics will remain the ultimate object of study for scholars of international refugee law.

Introduction to the Symposium on Critical International Law and Technology

Scholarship concerned with international law, technology, and computation has been burgeoning since the mid-to-late twentieth century. Over the past decade, it has taken shape as a discernible sub-field of international legal scholarship. An International Law and Technology Interest Group was created within the American Society of International Law in 2013, for instance. By 2021, international law and technology was already considered ripe for “rethinking.” Some of this work has been solutionist, aimed at generating order-restoring answers to the “upset[s]” caused by technological change. Some of it has been constitutionalizing, canvassing prospects for “a transformative constitutionalism for the digital human condition.” Much of the scholarship has sought to give humanist (or post-humanist) pause to the ever-increasing pace of technological change