Brief #16 - December 2024

The long-standing desire of European countries to externalise the processing of asylum applications has recently taken concrete form in the UK/Rwanda and Italy/Albania ’agreements’. While the British initiative has been abandoned, the Italian one has been temporarily blocked. Following the cancellation of the first two transfers of people on the move to camps in Albania, and pending the decision of the Court of Cassation in Rome on the Italian government’s appeal, the latter has recalled the (…)

Brief Migreurop #15 - July2023

Europe’s migration policy is characterised by a doctrine known as the "pull factor" [...]. Everything is geared towards strategies of dissuasion to limit entry and residence in the territory of the European Union (EU), with countries using the legal, administrative or military-police arsenal at their disposal to this end[...].
The main targets, often on a racist basis, are people who try to cross borders, who are threatened, hunted down or even accused of trafficking in human beings and (…)

Brief #14 - June 2022

Little known to the public, soft law is a formidable weapon in the hands of States, which use this method when they want to get around the constraints and rigidity that national laws or international texts and treaties would impose on them. It is often mobilized in the field of "migration control", without it always being easy to distinguish between the strict application of the law and its circumvention. The externalization of asylum and immigration policies is a typical example of the use (…)

Brief Migreurop #3 - 3rd edition, December 2021

Although criticism from NGOs has been ignored for many years, today Frontex is under the spotlight. Since it began operating in 2005, the European border and coast guard agency has played a growing role in the implementation of the European Union’s (EU) security-driven migration policy. Frontex has been hailed for a long time by European institutions which have relentlessly increased its competences for 15 years in the areas of control and expulsions, as well as its budget (which has risen (…)

Brief #13 - June 2021

Covid-19 has deepened structural inequalities. As a result, migrants from countries of the global South have been severely impacted by the pandemic and the measures aimed at curtailing its spread. People whose situation has been made illegal, displaced persons and those fleeing war or trying to get across borders to improve their lot have been hard hit by border closures. No longer able to “go home” and self-isolate, these people have endured a new form of warfare waged against them, in (…)