The Ethics of Resisting Deportation

Can anti-deportation resistance be justified, and if so how and by whom may, or perhaps should, unjust deportations be resisted? In this paper, I seek to provide an answer to these questions. The paper starts by describing the main forms and agents of anti-deportation action in the contemporary context. Subsequently, I examine how different justifications for principled resistance and disobedience may each be invoked in the case of deportation resistance. I then explore how worries about the resister’s motivation for engaging in the action and their epistemic position apply in the specific context of anti-deportation action and consider in what circumstances there is not merely a right but a duty to resist deportation. The upshot of this argument, I conclude, is that the liberal state ought to respond to anti-deportation action not by criminalising disobedience and resistance in this field, but rather by creating legal avenues for such actors to influence deportation decision-making. DOI 10.17879/95189423213

The ethics and politics of deportation in Europe

Defence date: 19 February 2019Examining Board: Professor Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Matthew Gibney, University of Oxford; Professor Iseult Honohan, University College Dublin; Professor Jennifer Welsh, McGill University (formerly European University Institute)This thesis explores key empirical and normative questions prompted by deportation policies and practices in the contemporary European context. The core empirical research question the thesis seeks to address is: what explains the shape of deportation regimes in European liberal democracies? The core normative research question is: how should we evaluate these deportation regimes morally? The two parts of the thesis address each of these questions in turn. To explain contemporary European deportation regimes, the four chapters of the first part of the thesis investigate them from a historical and multilevel perspective. (“Expulsion Old and New”) starts by comparing contemporary deportation practices to earlier forms of forced removal such as criminal banishment, political exile, poor law expulsion, and collective expulsions on a religious or ethnic basis, highlighting how contemporary deportation echoes some of the purposes of these earlier forms of expulsion. (“Divergences in Deportation”) looks at some major differences between European countries in how, and how much, deportation is used as a policy instrument today, concluding that they can be roughly grouped into four regime types, namely lenient, selective, symbolically strict and coercively strict. The next two chapters investigate how non-national levels of government are involved in shaping deportation in the European context. (“Europeanising Expulsion”) traces how the institutions of the European Union have come to both restrain and facilitate or incentivise member states’ deportation practices in fundamental ways. (“Localities of Belonging”) describes how provincial and municipal governments are increasingly assertive in frustrating deportations, effectively shielding individuals or entire categories of people from the reach of national deportation efforts, while in other cases local governments pressure the national level into instigating deportation proceedings against unwanted residents. The chapters argue that such efforts on both the supranational and local levels must be explained with reference to supranational and local conceptions of membership that are part of a multilevel citizenship structure yet can, and often do, come apart from the national conception of belonging. The second part of the thesis addresses the second research question by discussing the normative issues deportation gives rise to. (“Deportability, Domicile and the Human Right to Stay”) argues that a moral and legal status of non-deportability should be extended beyond citizenship to all those who have established effective domicile, or long-term and permanent residence, in the national territory. (“Deportation without Domination?”) argues that deportation can and should be applied in a way that does not dominate those it subjects by ensuring its non-arbitrary application through a limiting of executive discretion and by establishing proportionality testing in deportation procedures. (“Resisting Unjust Deportation”) investigates what can and should be done in the face of unjust national deportation regimes, proposing that a normative framework for morally justified antideportation resistance must start by differentiating between the various individual and institutional agents of resistance before specifying how their right or duty to resist a particular deportation depends on motivational, epistemic and relational conditions

Citizenship, domicile and deportability : who should be exempt from the state's power to expel?

First published online: 28 January 2020Legally and practically, only those with citizenship status enjoy absolute protections against deportation in liberal democracies. Yet deporting non-citizens who have resided on a state's territory for many years is increasingly controversial, as demonstrated by the many protests such deportations generate and the growing number of political theorists who argue that long-term residents should be granted a right to stay. In this article, I agree with these theorists that deporting long-term residents is morally troubling but propose an alternative theory about its wrongs. Instead of grounding these in the fact that such individuals have become de facto members of the societies in which they live, the contributions such individuals have made to their host societies, or their compatibility with these societies, I draw on theories about the moral importance of stable territorial residence as a basic background condition for human flourishing to formulate what I call a 'domicile principle of non-deportability'. This principle grounds such a moral and legal status in the fact that someone has made the territory in which they reside the centre of their most fundamental life projects and attachments. I also examine the implications of this argument for the comparison between citizen and long-term resident non-deportability

Introduction : expulsion and citizenship in the 21st century

First published online: 28 February 2020Deportation and denationalisation policies, which states employ to expel persons from their territory and membership respectively, have steadily increased in prominence over the last two decades. This special issue investigates these distinct but related phenomena and their relationship with, and implications for our understanding of, citizenship. In this editorial introduction, we outline the two main questions the different contributions to this special issue address. First, why has the 21st century seen a (partial) reversal of the trend of increasingly constrained denationalisation and deportation practices that occurred in the second half of the 20th century? Second, what are the normative implications of this reversal, specifically for our understanding of citizenship and belonging in our increasingly interconnected and mobile world? The individual contributions to this issue are introduced throughout, and the introduction concludes with some remarks on future research

Displacement, protection and responsibility : a case for safe areas

Online Publication Date: 21st May 2018This article makes the normative case for safe areas as a strategy of civilian protection in forced displacement crises. We start from the idea that the displaced—especially those who remain within the borders of their home state—are in a particularly precarious situation which can, in some circumstances, activate a remedial responsibility to provide protection on the part of the international community. We then argue that this responsibility extends beyond the provision of asylum to include efforts both to prevent displacement and to facilitate the return of displaced persons, and that safe areas may be an important tool to achieve these goals. However, we also note two major risks associated with safe areas which must be considered and mitigated: that they increase rather than decrease overall displacement, and that they diminish rather than enhance protection. We conclude by suggesting why and how the shared responsibility to protect through safe areas should be fairly distributed within the international community.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement No 340956 - IOW - The Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Ethics, Law, and Politics of Armed Conflict

Reducing pain in children with cancer : Methodology for the development of a clinical practice guideline

Although pain is one of the most prevalent and bothersome symptoms children with cancer experience, evidence-based guidance regarding assessment and management is lacking. With 44 international, multidisciplinary healthcare professionals and nine patient representatives, we aimed to develop a clinical practice guideline (following GRADE methodology), addressing assessment and pharmacological, psychological, and physical management of tumor-, treatment-, and procedure-related pain in children with cancer. In this paper, we present our thorough methodology for this development, including the challenges we faced and how we approached these. This lays the foundation for our clinical practice guideline, for which there is a high clinical demand