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Losing the Right to Have Rights:
EU Externalization of Border Control
Martin Lemberg-Pedersen
Introduction
In March 2011, 72 men, women and small children from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Su-
dan and Nigeria escaped the violence-ridden Libyan capital of Tripoli as they
boarded a small boat set to carry them to the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Quickly, though, the boat’s fuel tanks ran dry and they began to drift aimless-
ly around on the vast Mediterranean Sea. Survivors later told of how an Ital-
ian helicopter marked “army” had dropped water and cookies onto the boat
and then left again. Several days later, two helicopters from a nearby French
warship also flew over the boat, and even though the passengers held up two
small babies to the sky in order to show their desperate plight, these pilots
also turned away. Despite the Ghanian captain’s repeated satellite phone
calls for help, no help emerged from a Mediterranean Sea filled with NATO
warships helping to oust the Libyan dictator Gaddafi. As one day followed
the other, the passengers of the boat began to starve to death. An Ethiopian
survivor told how “Every morning we would wake up and find more bodies,
which we would leave for 24 hours and then throw away.” As the parents of
the two small babies died, the survivors saved a bottle of water to keep the
babies alive, but to no avail. They also passed away two days later. When the
boat finally, after 16 days, washed back up on the shores of Libya, 61 of its 72
passengers had died.
This tragic case is not unique. More than a thousand people drowned in
the Mediterranean following the North African spring and, according to the
NGO United Against Racism, 15,551 people have died since 1993 in the attempt
1 V. Walt, “Did NATO Leave 62 Afr icans to Die at Sea Of f Libya?” Time World, May 9, 2011.
(http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2070509,00.html).
© , , | ./ _
01
394 14
to reach European territory (United Against Racism website). The hazard-
ous conditions facing migrants in the Euro-African borderlands illustrate the
contested nature of immigration and border control, and how border control
posits a moral and political dilemma between states’ rights to sovereign dis-
cretion over their borders on the one hand and migrants’ right to seek and
be granted protection in states’ other than their own. Globally speaking, this
tension has grown since the end of the cold war and has created several geo-
political hot spots, such as the US-Mexican border, the Mediterranean Sea
and the Maghreb at the EU’s southern borderlands. In this chapter I examine
the state of migrants’ rights in the Euro-African borderlands.
The chapter is structured in the following manner: First I problematize a
conventional and widespread view on border control by way of critical ge-
ography and the conceptual framework of borderscapes. Then I develop this
framework by discussing the EU’s cooperation with third countries on border
control as externalization and notes an often-stated EU justification for this
policy. At this point I then illustrate how the borderscape model is capable of
appraising a number of central and worrisome developments and restructur-
ing processes, which have taken place in the management of the EU borders.
Thus, I trace and discuss the European policy drive to export migrant deten-
tion camps to North Africa in the period up to the rebellions, which toppled
Maghreb rulers like Gaddafi, Ben Ali and Mubarrak. Thereafter, I comple-
ment these findings with attention to the creation and major operations of
the Frontex Agency, and, finally, how the use of deportations has been sys-
tematized and the dynamics of the EUROSUR system.
At the end I conclude that analyses of these reconfigurations of the EU
borderscapes’ control infrastructure show how the union’s border control is
multi-local, relational and does not create protection elsewhere for vulner-
2 United Against Racism reports that while 2000 people had died up until mid-2001, that
number increased to 3026 by 2002, to 3750 by 2003, 4500 by 2004, 6300 by 2005, 7182 by
2006, 8800 by 2007, 11,105 by 2008 and 13,250 by 2009, 13,621 by 2010 and 15,551 by mid-
2011. Analyzing the numbers between 2001 and 2009 two significant trends stand out:
Whi le 4500 people died tr ying to reac h European ter ritory from 19 93 to 2004, t he number
reached 11,051 fat alities between 2005 to 2011. Moreover, while the average an nual rate of
mig rant f atal ities f rom 20 01 to 20 04 was 833, it ro se to 1688 in the years f rom 200 8 to 201 1.
These numbers, moreover, are almost certainly too low as EU Member States are reluc-
tant to undertake any systematic registration of fatalities connected with their border
control and because of the massive difficulties of media sources in gathering informa-
tion on fatalities among European-bound migrants, which occur long before these get
close to European territory. (United Against Racism website. Available at: http://www.
unitedagainstracism.org/pages/underframeFatalRealitiesFortressEurope.htm).
395
able migrants. Rather, I claim, the European border control has systematized
violations elsewhere and thus undermine both European and African states’
willingness to protect the rights of migrants.
Exported Borderscapes? The Decoupling of Border Control from
European Territories
While border control has gained unprecedented attention in European pub-
lic and political debates over the last 20 years, these debates have most of-
ten reverted to a closed system perspective, which understands borders as the
territorial property of individual nation-states. According to such a perspec-
tive, states are somehow already in existence, replete with a fixed territory
demarcated by borders. These borders protect communal rights and duties
and a cultural identity. This dominant understanding of borders relies heav-
ily on a set of idealized realist geopolitical assumptions and has generated
the epistemic dogma that states are simply territorial containers of society
and sovereign power and the guarantors of people’s human rights. As such,
the assumptions behind this common view on borders reify the perspective
of states and represent a tendency for closed system thinking that omits the
multifaceted and contested dynamics of transnational sites and phenomena,
such as border control and migration. Consequently, this closed system per-
spective falls into the “territorial trap” of methodological nationalism and is
uniquely ill equipped for analyzing a range of transnational dynamics in to-
day’s globalized world.
The closed system dogma with its state centric conception of borders is
partly explainable by the resurgence of nationalistic political imagination in
Europe during the last 20 years, but it faces several problems. For one thing,
such a perspective views people moving across borders as exceptions from
a normal and established order of things. It thus effectively transforms mi-
grants into misplaced existences. Moreover, the perspective reifies controver-
sial border enforcement practices like detention camps, mass deportations
or regimes of surveillance, and fails to question their impact on migrants’
fundamental rights. To counter this tendency, I follow work in the fields of
critical geopolitics and border studies, which in recent years have sought to
3 J. Agnew, “The territorial trap: the geographical assu mptions of international relations
theory”. Re view of International Political Economy, 1(1) 1994, p. 51-80; A. Wimmer and N.
Glick Schiller, “Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migra-
tion and the social sciences.” Global Net works, 2(4) 2002, p. 301-334.
396 14
deconstruct the dominant European political imagination concerning the
limits of states and their conduct of border control.
A more promising conceptual framework for understanding the EU’s
border control is that of borderscapes. The borderscapes framework seeks
to identify the dynamic and relational processes underpinning European
border politics. In general, borderscapes can be seen as multifaceted socio-
geographic landscapes of power, which produce structures and cover over
“hidden geographies” of excluded and marginalized groups. While this def-
inition of borderscapes is very broad, it fixes our attention to the fact that
borders are highly complex sites constituted through multiple interventions
from multiple actors. It highlights how the European borderscapes’ produce
dominant geographies, and cover over other, more marginalized existences,
guided by the continuous construction and reconstruction of multidimen-
sional abstractions of knowledge, power and technologies.
Paying attention to the supranational processes of borders is crucial for un-
derstanding the development of the European border control. Thus, the EU’s
administrative and political institutions describe the union’s transnational
border control in terms of “external action” of the EU’s Home Affairs policies.
In the union’s Global Approach to Migration (2005), the union define these
policies in the following manner:
Migration cannot be managed by the EU alone. Finding ways to address
the challenges and make the most of the benefits brought by migration
requires dialogue and partnerships with non-EU countries. The Global
Approach to migration is, since 2005, the EU’s framework for dialogue
and cooperation with non-EU countries of origin, transit and destina-
tion. It enables migration and asylum issues to be addressed in a com-
prehensive way (Global Approach to Migration website).
The EU’s discourses seem to oscillate between two framings of the pre-emp-
tive rationale behind its transnational border control. Thus, the Danish EU
Presidency of 2012 framed EU external action on border control as “contribut-
4 G. O Thuathail, Critical Geopolitics. Routledge, London 1996; H. va n Houtum and T. van
Naerssen, “Bordering, Ordering and Othering.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale
Geografie, 93(2) 2002, p. 1 25-136; N. Vaughan-Wil liams, Border Politics: The Limits of Sov-
ereign Power. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2009.
5 K. Rajararam Prem and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and
Politics at Territory’s Edge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2007, p. x.
6 Rajararam and Grundy-Warr, 2007, p. xxv-xxvi.
397
ing to better the fundamental rights of irregular migrants and those in need
of international protection.“ At the same time, however, the Danish Presi-
dency also reverts to an analogy likening migrants with water flows, saying
that “Working upstream in countries of origin and transit,” can “help stem
the flow of illegal migration and secondary movement to the EU.” While
these framings can be seen as complementary, they also highlight a tension
between the perceived need to counter migration and the rights of migrants.
Recognizing vulnerable individuals with urgent and legitimate protection
needs obviously becomes more difficult when border policies are motivated
by interests in “stemming the flow” of migrants, the conditions and needs of
which are not differentiated from each other.
Academic scholars have, during the 2000s, responded to this political de-
velopment by discussing extraterritorial European border control through
the concept of externalization. Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, for instance,
defines “extraterritorial migration control” as a general trend in many states
“to extend the reach of migration control to destinations outside its territory
and to employ agents other than the state’s own authorities.” Correspond-
ing to the dual framing produced by the EU, Christina Boswell distinguishes
between preventive externalization that purports to address the root causes
behind refugee flows, and the export of classical migration control to other
countries. According to Sandra Lavenex and Emek Ucarer, the integration of
EU Member States’ immigration policies has resulted in several modes where-
by the European priorities are transferred to non-European host countries.
These modes are then determined by whether the third country functions as
receiving, transit or sending country for European-bound asylum seekers.
Even if the European priorities run counter to those of the third countries,
political and economic EU pressure often have the effect that the countries
choose to follow them anyway. Complementing these conceptualizations of
externalization, Thierry Balzacq has proposed to view externalization as a
7 Justitsministeriet. 2012. Discussion paper: Informal Justice and Home Affairs Ministers’
Meeting. Copenhagen 26-27 January 2012.
8 T. Gammeltoft-Hansen, Access to Asylum. Cambr idge Universit y Press, Cambr idge 2011,
p. 2.
9 C. Boswell, The “external dimension” of EU immigration and asylum policy. Interna-
tional Affairs, 79(3) 2003, p. 613.
10 S. Lavenex and E. Ucarer, “The External Dimension of Europeanization: The Case of
Immigration Policies.” Cooperation and Conf lict, 39(4) 2004, p. 435.
11 Lavenex and Ucarer, 2004, p. 420-421; A. Betts and J. Milner, The Externalisation of EU
Asylum Policy: The Position of African States, DIIS Brief, December 2007, Copenhagen
2007, p. 1-2.
398 14
continuum of instances where an actor, here the EU, through international
negotiations may gain “remote control” over the border control of other ac-
tors, here third countries, which, in turn can lead to the extraterritorial con-
duct of migration and border control.
Taking these discussions into consideration, I shall understand externali-
zation to denote processes whereby European nation-states, intergovernmen-
tal or supranational actors complement their policies on migration control
across their territorial boundaries with initiatives, which realize this control
beyond their territories. Externalization therefore amounts to an extrater-
ritorial and pre-emptive control of migration, where some actors export this
control while others agree, more or less willingly, to host it. In so far that talk-
ing about externalization accurately reflects how European border control
has evolved in recent years it has several important implications for our un-
derstanding of borders and their consequences. We can say that the European
border governance has developed according to internal and external dynam-
ics, both of which makes state-centric perspectives problematic: Along the
implementation of the free internal mobility of European citizens within the
Schengen space, the external European borders have increasingly been de-
coupled from the actual territorial boundaries of European nation-states and
are now enforced globally.
One way to assess the impact of European border control on the rights of
migrants is to analyze the European borderscapes in terms of three interde-
pendent axes, namely those of politics, material infrastructure and the hu-
manitarian consequences for migrants. In the following sections I explain the
relation between these axes of the European borderscapes by analyzing four
central developments of the current EU border system. These components
are: the externalization of migrant detention camps, the operations of Fron-
12 T. Balzacq, “Frontiers of Governance: Understanding the External Dimension of EU
Justic e and Home Affa irs”, in Thierr y Balzacq (ed.), The Exter nal Dimen sion of EU Justice
and Home Affairs: Governance, Neighbours, Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire
2009, p. 2-3.
13 Of course, this presents a somewhat idealized picture of the internal mobility within
the EU. Recently, several Member States, like Denmark, France, Germany and Nether-
lands have sought to impose some forms of border control between European states,
and more generally the Schengen Border Code also allows Member States to impose
temporar y controls during, for instance, major sporting events. Moreover, precedents
for thi s border governance, s uch as the US interc eptions of Haiti an boatrefuge es during
the 1990s and the Australian so-called Pacific Solution, indicate that the decoupling of
migration control from territorial border is not a purely European phenomenon, but a
global tendency.
399
tex, the systematization of deportation practices and the creation of the EU-
ROSUR “early warning system”. Together, these components show how the EU
borderscapes are multi-local, relational and how they both create and cover
over deeply worrying humanitarian consequences for migrants.
Protection Anywhere? Tracing EU’s Externalization of Detention
Camps
As mentioned, EU policy documents portray externalization as engaging
transit countries and regions of origin in cooperative schemes on develop-
ment aid, protection, asylum, border control and the root causes of migra-
tion. More specifically, the EU have pointed to its Regional Protection Pro-
grammes (RPPs), launched in 2004, as an example of how externalization
secures the rights of migrants. The Commission has, for instance, portrayed
the RPPs as enhancing the protection capacity of the regions involved and
as offering repatriation, resettlement, work schemes and local integration to
local refugee population. Small RPP pilots have been funded in Ukraine, Be-
larus, Moldova and Tanzania via the Aeneas and Tacis Programmes, and in
2010 it announced plans to allocate €3.4 million to develop an RPP pilot in
North Africa.
By opening up other destinations to which people can migrate the Com-
mission can be seen as claiming that the RPP approach ensures “protection
elsewhere”. Protection elsewhere policies are premised on the idea that Euro-
pean states do not have a duty to offer protection to migrants, but that they
can facilitate that migrants receive protection in other countries. If we un-
derstand protection to denote the respect for ind ividual’s rights, we ca n there-
fore view the Commission as claiming that protection elsewhere policies in
the form of Regional Protection Programmes discharge the EU’s commitment
14 Commission of the European Communities. Communication from the Commission to
the Counc il and the Europea n Parliament: O n Regional Protec tion Programm es. 1.9.20 05,
Brussels. COM(2005) 388 f inal. 2005b, p. 1.
15 Council of the European Union. Com mission Staf f Working Docume nt: on the fulf illment
of the 29 measures for reinforcing the protection of the external borders and combatting
illegal immigration adopted at the Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting, held on
Brussels on 25 and 26 February 2010. 29.11.2010, SEC(2010) 1480 final. 2010, p. 5.
16 S. Taylor, “Protection Elsewhere/Nowhere”, International Journal of Refugee Law, 18(2)
2006, p. 283. See also UNHCR. “The Concept of ‘Protection Elsewhere’.” International
Journa l of Refugee Law, ( 7) 1995 and A. Hurw itz, The collective responsibilit y of states to
protect refugees. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009, p. 127-138.
400 14
to protect rights extraterritorially. This illustrates how the relational charac-
ter of the EU borderscapes can be invoked to justify certain control policies:
Even if externalized control restricts migrants’ right to free movement, the
claim goes, it also secures their rights proactively, since third countries are
integrated into the EU borderscapes and their humanitarian standards. Here,
however, we should note that the ideas of RPPs and protection elsewhere are
not as innovative as is claimed, but that they have a very controversial history
within the European borderscapes. Tracing the externalization of migrant
detention camps allow us to appraise how discourses on rights protection
have, in fact, facilitated the rise of the external control regime.
The protection elsewhere approach to European border control can be
traced back to the 1980s. Here, the Danish Schlüter government launched the
idea of exporting camps to countries outside Europe. This happened in a 1986
draft proposal for the UN Third Committee where the Danes argued that it
was necessary to mobilize “the collective political will of the international
community to seek long-term and equitable solution” to the problem of refu-
gees’ lacking protection. The countries had to be prepared to increase aid
and share the “burden” of asylum seekers. Most importantly, though, it was
argued that a string of UN-run “processing centers” should be created outside
Europe. The Danish Proposal noted that such camps would offer protection
for migrants on the one hand, but at the same time also allow European coun-
tries to administratively deport all asylum seekers on European territory to
processing procedures in such camps. It would also be beneficial for the de-
portees, it was argued, because the camps would have “similar environment
and people” to the migrants. The UN Third Committee deferred to decide on
the Danish Proposal, citing that the venue used by the Danes was not the
proper one for such a wide-ranging proposal. Nonetheless, the ideas voiced
in it were to remain within the political imagination of Europe, and would
resurface again several times during the following 20 years.
When Denmark assumed t he EU presidency in 20 02, the idea experienced a
veritable renaissance as the Fogh government, strongly backed by the nation-
alist-populist Danish Peoples Party, revived the idea. To this end the Danish
17 “Danish Proposal.” UN Third Committee. Summar y Record 39th meeting. UN Gen-
eral Assembly forty-first session, held on Friday, November 7th 1986. Distr. General
A/C.3/41/SR.39. 1986.
18 “Danish proposal”, 1986, p. 8.
19 G. Noll, “V isions of the Except ional: Legal a nd Theoretical Issues Raised by Tran sit Pro-
cessing Centers and P rotection Zones”. Europ ean Journal of Mig ration and Law. 5, 2003:
311-312.
401
Presidency called EU cooperation with Libya on the control of irregular mi-
gration as “not only desirable but essential.” In June that same year, the EU
Seville Presidency Conclusions also formulated the migration development
nexus, which was to become a cornerstone in EU-third country relations:
The European Council considers it necessary to carry out a systematic
assessment of relations with third countries which do not cooperate in
combatting illegal immigration. That assessment will be taken into ac-
count in relations between the European Union and its Member States
and the countries concerned, in all relevant areas. Insufficient coopera-
tion by a country could hamper the establishment of closer relations be-
tween that country and the Union.
With its Dutch and British counterparts, the Danish government formed an
inf luential Northwestern Triade and lobbied hard to make the externaliza-
tion of camps official EU policy. When the United Kingdom’s Blair govern-
ment at the height of its power published its “New Vision for Refugees,” it was
clearly aligned with its Danish predecessor. Thus, the UK New Vision envi-
sioned externalized UN-run camps in Eastern Europe and North Africa, now
labeled “Regional Protection Areas” (RPAs). The core idea remained that such
EU-funded camps should replace asylum processing on European territory,
and thereby facilitate the administrative deportation of asylum seekers from
Europe, perceived as a burden for the asylum systems. However, the UK New
Vision departed from the explicitly humanitarian terminology found in the
Danish proposal, and was much more clear in its focus on European security
concerns. For instance, it explicitly stated that military intervention could be
one of several solutions to prevent refugee flows from arriving in Europe.
The UK New Vision was, however, also rejected as official EU policy at the
Thessaloniki Council in 2003 due to severe humanitarian criticism. Several
NGOs argued that such camps would not be able to offer a protection that
lived up to the EU’s duties and that states could not outsource their territorial
obligations to provide access to protection and asylum procedures. The UN-
20 Council of the European Union. 2463rd Council meeting. General Affairs and External
Relations, 14183/02 (Presse 350), 18.11.2002. Brussels 2002a, p. 5-6.
21 Counci l of the European Un ion. Seville Eu ropean Council 21 a nd 22 June 2002: P recidency
Conclusions, OR 13463/02, POLGEN 52. 29.12.2002. 2002b, p. 11.
22 “UK New Vision.” New Vi sion for Refugee s. UK Government 2003.
23 “UK New Vision,” 2003, p. 26.
24 Amnesty International. UK/EU/UNHCR: Unlawful and Unworkable, AI Index:
61/004/2003.
402 14
HCR instead proposed a much-criticized “counter-proposal”: a three-pronged
model including region-based solutions, improved asylum procedures and t he
processing of asylum claims in EU reception camps on European territory.
The Danish, Dutch and Spanish governments, however, rejected the UNHCR
proposal favoring instead the UK New Vision and was joined by the German
Schröder-government, which argued that the UNHCR camps were unfeasi-
ble, since they would increase the amount of asylum claims to Europe.
The Northwestern Triade’s discourse on externalized camps, with its fo-
cus on regionalized protection, extraterritorial asylum processing and bur-
den sharing illustrate how the discourses surrounding the externalization of
camps do not accord to a clear cut case of securitization. Still, the core of
the idea was extremely controversial. Thus, passages in the UK New Vision
indicates that the Triade was so determined to reduce the amount of asylum
seekers to Europe, that they were willing to compromise their responsibility
towards migrants. For instance, in its New Vision paper, the UK government
contemplated a withdrawal from the ECHR’s Article 3 and the Refugee Con-
vention’s article 33.1 saying: “If we only had to concern ourselves with torture,
inhuman and degrading treatment that happens in the UK, we could remove
anyone off the territory without obligation. Coupled with a withdrawal from
the Geneva Convention refoulement should be possible and the notion of an
asylum seeker in the UK should die.” This remarkable statement explicates
the unstated implications of the earlier Danish proposal on externalization,
and illustrates how the Northwestern Triade seemed more interested in mini-
mizing asylum claims in their territories than in minimizing inhumane and
degrading treatment and the persecution of deported migrants.
The vision of externalization launched by the Northwestern Triade’s is
not only illustrative because it explicates the humanitarian and legal im-
plications of externalization policies. It would also serve as a crucial step-
ping-stone for the evolution of the EU’s policy on externalized camps. Thus,
although the UK New Vision was rejected, the EU’s official policy began to
change around this time. During a July 2004 Council meeting the German
minister of the interior, Otto Schily, began to lobby for a German version of
externalization. Its components were eventually formulated in a September
2005 document called “Effective Protection for Refugees, Effective Combat
25 UNHCR . “UNHCR’s Three-Pronged Proposal”. UNHCR Working Paper, 2003.
26 See also Noll, 2003, p. 306.
27 “UK New Vision”, 2003, p. 9.
403
against Illegal Migration.” This proposal gained the support of Schily’s Ital-
ian counterpart, Guiseppe Pisanu, and the Italian Justice and Home Affairs
Commissioner, Rocco Buttiglione, and eventually also from the Northwestern
Triade.
The Schily Proposal aligned itself with the Northwestern Triade’s ideas
of externalized camps, now labeled “EU reception centers”, operated by the
UNHCR, singling out Morocco, Tunisia and especially Libya as host coun-
tries for such camps despite the well-known fact that Libya refused to sign
the Refugee Convention. Moreover, the Germans focused more on the need
for systematizing EU deportations stating that not only spontaneous asylum
seekers on European territory, but also boat-migrants intercepted in inter-
national waters, could be administratively deported to the North African
camps. According to the Germans, the principle of non-refoulement would
not apply when European states intercept and deport boat-migrants in the
extraterritorial space of international waters, even though scholars argued
that this misrepresented more than a decade of international legal debate on
non-refoulement. In 2012 this legal opinion would be backed up by the ver-
dict of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Hirsi and others v
Italy. In 2005, however, proponents of the Schily Proposal were unphased by
the uproar among legal scholars. They considered the problem solved through
the vague formulation that states hosting the camps ought “principally” to
be signatories to the Refugee Convention – or at least act in accordance with
it. Notably, the Schily Proposal also rejected the Northwestern Triade’s idea
of extraterritorial asylum processing in the camps, instead limiting their
function to conducting pre-screening programmes and offering temporary
working permits. As such, the Schily Proposal continued and reinforced the
28 “Schily Proposal.” Bundesministerium des Innern: Effektiver Schutz für Flüchtlinge,
wirkungsvölle Bekämpfung illegaler Migration – ûberlegungen des Bundesministers des
Innern zur Errichtung einer EU-Aufnahmeeinrichtung in Nordafrika, Pressemitteilung.
Bundesministerium des Innern 2005.
29 “Schily Proposal,” 2005, p. 3, 5 and 6.
30 “Schily Proposal,” 2005, p. 1.
31 “Schily Proposal,” 2005, p. 3.
32 A. Fischer-Lescano and T. Löhr, Border Controls at Sea: Requirements under Interna-
tional Hu man Rights and Refugee La w. European Center for Constitutional and Human
Rights. 2007, p. 5.
33 Fischer-Lecano and Löhr, 2007, p. 4.
34 Fischer-Lecano and Löhr, 2007, p. 4; see also Betts, A. The creation of transit centers
outside the European Union. Memorandum, Committee on Migration, Refugees and De-
mography. AS/Mig 06. 2006, p. 4.
404 14
strengthened focus on internal European security of the New Vision. As such,
the Schily Proposal represents a significant transformation of the idea of pro-
tection elsewhere through externalized camps. An idea, which had originally
been presented in the language of humanitarian protection in regions of ori-
gin, seemed to be turning into an administrative deportation and detention
regime in breach of international law.
The common-European discussions between the JHA Council and the
Commission, evolved similarly in the following years and it was at this point
that the Commission, in a June 2004 Communication, first introduced the
idea of creating Regional Protection Programmes in cooperation with the
UNHCR. The RPPs, it was said, were to ensure “orderly entry” and assist
transit countries in becoming the countries where migrants received first
protection and filed asylum claims. Testifying to the German influence in
the EU, the Communication dropped the idea that they could offer migrants
direct access to claiming asylum in European countries through protected
entry procedures because, as the Commission stated, the EU Member States
did not have the “common perspective and confidence” to realize such a poli-
cy. In emergency cases the entry of persons with immediate protection needs
could be “procedurally facilitated” though “at the full discretion of individual
Member States” and only after initial pre-screening outside European terri-
tory, which was seen as desirable from a security perspective. Furthermore,
to facilitate this transformed protection elsewhere policy, the Commission
decided to send a Technical Mission to Libya in order to assess the country’s
potential as a host country for regional protection in the form of externalized
camps.
In Libya, the Commission’s Technical Mission found that Italy had been
funding large detention facilities in Kufra, Sebha and Ghat for years, that they
were operating deportation flights and, alongside Malta, had supplied equip-
ment to the Libyan authorities, including 1,000 bodybags. The Commission’s
Mission Report claimed that the Libyan detention conditions were “difficult
but relatively acceptable” given the large influx of migrants and the under-
35 Commission of the European Communities. On the Managed Entr y in the EU of Persons
in Need of Inter national P rotection an d the Enhancem ent of the Protec tion Capacit y of the
Regions of O rigin: Improvin g Access to Durabl e Solutions. 4.6.2004, Brussels. COM(2004)
410 final. 2004, p. 17-18.
36 Commission ..., 2004, p. 20.
37 Commission ..., 2004, p. 7 and 12.
38 Commission of the European Communities. Technical Mission to Libya on Illegal Mi-
gration, November 27 –December 6, 20 04 Report, No. 7753/05. Brussels 2005a, p. 59 -60.
405
equipped, undermanned and poorly trained Libyan border police. The
Commission noted approvingly of the Libyan plans to increase the number of
border control officers from 3,500 to 42,000 and urged the union to increase
its financial support to Libya. The Council reacted to the Mission Report
with the cryptic and open formulation that “any cooperation with Libya can
only be limited in scope and take place on a technical ad hoc basis.” While
seemingly cautious, this formulation actually opened up for comprehensive
“ad hoc” cooperation on control between Libya and European actors. In line
with the Mission Report, the Aeneas Programme, which distributed finan-
cial aid to third countries in the area of migration management, was put to
use in Libya, to which Schily commented that the vision of externalization
contained in his Proposal had “now become concrete policy.” Alongside the
supranational EU drive to engage with Libya bilateral agreements between
Libya and Italy in 2004 and 2008 were also crucial. Included in the 2008 agree-
ment was an alleged EU promise to fund 50 pct. of a C3 border control system,
which was to be constructed by the Italian military company Finmeccanica
along Libya’s southwestern borders with Niger and Chad.
In 2007, a second EU Technical Mission led by Frontex was sent to Libya,
all but reiterating the union’s commitment to collaborate with the Gaddafi re-
gime. And in October 2010, the Commission reported that the JHA Commis-
sioner, Cecilia Malmström, and the Enlargement and Neighborhood Policy
Commissioner, Stefan Füle, had held “constructive talks” with Libyan rep-
resentatives in Tripoli concerning a list of possible initiatives. The Commis-
sioners also agreed to pay Libya €60 million. These included developing the
Libyan capacity to manage its borders, to organize migration flows, to fight
smuggling and trafficking and to protect refugees according to international
standards. As it turned out, however, the rebellion against Gaddafi com-
menced before the EU could transfer the promised funds.
The externalization of the EU borderscapes, however, has vast conse-
quences for migrants both within, and especially beyond European territory.
39 Commission ..., 2005a, p. 34 .
40 Commission ..., 2005a, p. 47.
41 Council of the European Union. 2664th Council meeting. Justice and Home Affairs. Lux-
embourg. June 2-3, 2005, p. 18.
42 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “Zusammenarbeit mit Libyen gegen Einwanderung wird konk-
ret,” June 3, 2005.
43 “Italian Libyan Friendship Treaty.” Trattato di Amicizia, Partenariato e Cooperazione
tra la Repubblica Italiana e la Grande Giamahiria Araba Libica Popolare Socialista.
2008, p. 8.
44 Council …, 2010, p. 20-21.
406 14
Humanitarian NGOs have throughout the 2000s produced a growing body of
reports documenting how the EU’s favored partners in externalization com-
mit massive violations against migrants. A migrant named Tigiste told Jesuit
Refugee Service about her experiences in Libya:
The guards often struck me; if they asked me something and I said no,
they would immediately hit. My husband spent time in Twaisha too. He
was so disoriented and unwell when he left t his pr ison; it is very bad. My
uncle is still in Twaisha. He was tortured with electric shocks and beat-
en by the guards. They thought he was dead so they threw his body in
the garbage. He was there for two days then someone went and tapped
him and he stirred. He was taken to hospital, treated for four days and
returned to Twaisha.
Tigiste’s account is frighteningly similar to those of other migrants being de-
tained in Libya because of European control policies. Countless migrants tell
of being savagely beaten, exposed to electric torture, sexual exploitation, or
of being dumped in desert regions. Many tell that their terrible ordeal was
caused by the Italian-Libyan push back practice, starting in 2009, where they
were intercepted by the Italian coastguard and returned to Libyan military
units. A common practice, which gained systemic proportions under Gaddafi
was the trafficking of migrants through vast desert areas. In this fashion, tens
of thousands of migrants, including women and children, were circulated for
days, across the vast Libyan deserts, between official and smugglers’ deten-
tion facilities in trucks and containers, with little or no food, and being forced
to urinate and defecate while standing.
Maria-Teresa Gil-Bazo describes the resulting EU border system, as func-
tioning according to a logic of internal European security, which requires the
45 Jesuit Ref ugee Serv ice Malta. Do The y Know? Asyl um seekers test ify to lif e in Libya. Ma lta
2009, p. 11.
46 Human Rights Watch. Nowhere to Turn: State abuses of unaccompanied migrant chil-
dren by Spain and Morocco. 14(4)D. 2002; Human Rights Watch. Pushed Back, Pushed
Around. 2009. Available at: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/09/21/pushed-back-
pushed-around-0, accessed October 2nd, 2009; Doctors Without Borders. Activity Re-
port 2006. 2006; GADEM. The Human Rights of Sub-Saharan Migrants in Morocco. GA-
DEM 2010.
47 Human Rights Watch, 2009, p. 71.
407
preemptive containment of migrants. According to her, the border system
works to secure that
Individuals do not leave their countries of origin (visa regimes, carrier
sanctions); or if they manage to do so, that they remain as close as pos-
sible to their country/region of origin; or if they manage to reach the EU,
that they may be removed to “safe third countries”; and, if all that fails,
that only one Member State be responsible for any given asylum seeker,
namely, the one that fails to control the external borders of the EU.
Our tracing of the European policies on protection elsewhere through exter-
nalization thus shows how the EU’s 2004 launch of RPPs should not be seen
as an innovative rupture in European protection policies. Rather it repre-
sented an under-pr ioritized offspring of a much stronger policy drive, namely
to minimize asylum claims in Europe by exporting both the duty to protect
migrants as well as the actual control outside the continent. This analysis also
show how the external dimension of EU border control has deliberately inte-
grated Libya into the union’s transnational border system and has relied on
the “effectiveness” of bilateral control agreements between Libya and Italy.
Although rights protection has continued to figure in the European discours-
es on externalization, the actual implementation of the control system has
undermined the rights of migrants to a hitherto unseen extent.
Despite these well-known consequences of the externalized European bor-
der control, the development has continued unabated. Although Gaddafi has
now been removed from power, tales of abuse and degrading treatment of
Sub Saharan migrants in Libya are surfacing from the country once more. To
understand why the EU has not altered its course it is useful to sketch three
other components of its border system and how they link to the union’s ex-
ternal control.
The Creation of Frontex, Mass Deportations and EUROSUR
Alongside the cooperation with the Libyan Gaddafi regime, another material
restructuring of the EU borderscapes occurred along the lines laid down in
the Schily Proposal. In 2004, the EU’s Frontex Agency was created through
48 Gil-Bazo, M.-T. “The Practice of Mediterranean States in the context of the European
Union’s Justice and Home Affairs External Dimension. The Safe Third Country Revis-
ited.” International Journal of Refugee Law, Vol. 18, No. 3-4, 2006: 571-600.
408 14
Council Regulation 2007/2004 and tasked with controlling Europe’s external
borders in order to safeguard the free mobility of Schengen citizens. Since
then, Frontex has implemented a vast amoung of operations, concerned with
naval patrols, surveillance flights, deportations, training in airports and the
reception and return of unaccompanied minors. Three operations illustrate
the multi-local and relational functionality of the Agency and how it has ex-
panded the EU’s maritime interception policies greatly. These are the Hera,
Nautilus and Poseidon operations, which, together, have attempted to shut
down migration routes in the West African, Central Mediterranean and East-
ern European regions.
Hera was the first off icial joint operation of Frontex and took place in 2006-
2007. It comprised patrols in the territorial waters of Senegal, Mauritania and
Cap Verde and prevented around 6,000 West African migrants from reaching
the Canary Islands, where they could have applied for asylum. The equipment
for Hera consisted of aircrafts, helicopters, vessels and interrogation experts,
made available by countries like Italy, Finland, Spain, France and Denmark
(Frontex website). As migration flows shifted from the West African to the
Central Mediterranean route, so did Frontex’s focus and since 2008 opera-
tion Nautilus has launched extensive patrols in order to monitor African mi-
grants headed for Malta and Italy. Controversy concerning this operation
broke loose as Human Rights Watch accused a German Puma helicopter for
coordinating Italian coastguard’s handing-over of migrants to Libyan mili-
tar y units. Since 2006 Frontex has also patrolled the coastal waters between
Greece and Turkey in cooperation with the Greek coastguard. As migration
flows towards Europe once again shifted due to the Hera and Nautilus opera-
tions and Turkey emerged as the dominant country of transit for migrants en-
tering Europe, these operations, falling under the heading Poseidon have also
been stepped up. Thus, in 2010, Frontex responded by adding a land-based
component to Poseidon’s maritime operations, in order to cover the Greek
and Bulgarian borderlands.
Depending on the political discourses in Europe, these general Frontex
operations are also boosted by more exceptional operations. Thus, as 34,000
individuals arrived on the borders of Greece with Turkey in the first nine
months of 2010, compared with 29,100 in all of 2008, Frontex implemented, for
the first time ever, its exceptional RABIT (Rapid Border Intervention Teams)
49 In April 2010 Operation Nautilus was renamed Operation Chromos.
50 Human Rights Watch, 2009, p. 37.
51 F. Düvell, 2011. Studying Migration from, to and through Turkey: The Context. Turkish
Migration Study Group. Compas, Oxford 2011.
409
to address what European political leaders perceived as an immigration cri-
sis. This meant the deployment of 200 “guest officers” from 26 EU Member
States and Schengen-associated countries as well as the loan of a helicopter,
minibuses, patrol cars, thermo vision vans and office units from countries
like Romania, Austria, Germany, Hungary and Denmark. Similarly, as the
so-called North African Spring occurred in 2011 and prompted around 52,000
Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans to set sails for Lampedusa, Frontex rushed
to implement the operation called Hermes Extension, where coastal patrol
vessels, aircrafts and experts were made available by countries like Italy,
Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain (Frontex
website). While the activities of Frontex illustrate the dynamic character of
the European borderscapes’ control infrastructure, the growth of another
control practice illustrate the relational and multi-local character of the EU
borderscapes, namely deportations through readmission agreements.
Deportations take place through bilateral and multilateral readmission
agreements, that is, interstate relations on border control. From the 1980s and
onwards, Member States like Italy, Greece, Spain and France have concluded
an ever-increasing amount of readmission agreements. These allow the states
to place failed asylum seekers from third countries on deportation flights and
transport them out of Europe. To name a just a few, readmission agreements
exist between Spain and Morocco, Italy and Libya, France and Algeria, and
Greece and Turkey. This has resulted in various kinds of return operations,
many of which have been accused of violating the rights of migrants. For in-
stance, the Greek practice of leading groups of 50-100 people to the river Evros
at nightfall, and push them towards Turkey in small boats has been accused of
leading to numerous drownings, or the Italian-Libyan push back practice,
commenced in 2009, whereby Italian-bound migrants are intercepted in in-
ternational waters and returned to Libyan military units.
Despite these controversies, deportations have evolved into a corner-stone
in the material dimension of the EU borderscapes of the 21th century. Thus,
the total amount of readmission agreements between EU Member States and
third countries has increased from 33 in 1986, to 156 in 1995, 186 in 2004 and
52 Frontex. Interceptions at EU land and sea borders during 2008. Frontex, Warsaw 2009;
Frontex. Situation of ir regular migration in Greece. Frontex, Warsaw 2010b.
53 Frontex. Frontex to deploy 175 Specialist Border-control personnel to Greece. Frontex
press release. Frontex, Warsaw 2010a.
54 Human Rights Watch. Stuck in a Revolving Door: Iraqis and Other Asylum Seekers and
Migrant s in the Greece/Turkey Entrance to the European Union. 2008.
410 14
216 in 2010. In 2009, the European use of deportations was further reified on
the common-European level as joint Frontex deportations were introduced.
While Frontex up until then was coordinating Member States’ deportations
and chartered flights on behalf of the states, the Agency now charters flights
and conducts the deportations itself. This has resulted in a swift rise of Fron-
tex deportations: while the Agency coordinated 15 joint deportation f lights in
2008, it was involved in 32 flights in 2009 and 39 flights the following year.
The systematic nature of these operations is also illustrated by the fact that
the Agency set up “return coordination offices” in Greece and Malta in order
to assist local authorities in dealing with travel documents and returning il-
legally present third-country nationals . In the last two years 1,622 and 2,038
persons, respectively, have been deported to countries like Nigeria, Cam-
eroon, Ivory Coast, Burundi, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Kosovo, Albania, Georgia,
Ecuador and Columbia. Receiving, respectively, 17 and 15 deportation flights,
Nigeria has emerged as the main destination for European deportees.
The general trend towards the increased use of deportations follows the
political priorities stated in the 2002 Seville Presidency Conclusions, which
called for the “speeding up of the conclusion of readmission agreements cur-
rently being negotiated and approval of new briefs for the negotiation of re-
admission agreements with countries already identified by the countries.”
However, the Seville goals have faced difficulties: Although Frontex conclud-
ed a working arrangement with Nigeria in January 2012, others countries, like
Morocco, have so far been unwilling to conclude multilateral return arrange-
ments with the EU out of fear that they will be transformed into dumping
zones for Europe’s deportees. These disagreements illustrate how the rela-
tional character of the EU borderscapes means that they are shaped by dy-
namics of localized geopolitics, that is, how the relational character of the
European borderscapes creates variations in the kinds of control enforced by
the EU borders. Yet, despite these examples, it is safe to say that the EU is
55 J-P. Cassarino, Unbalanced Reciprocities: Cooperation on Readmission in the Euro-Med-
iterranean Area. The Middle East Institute, Special Edition, Viewpoints, Washington
D.C. 2010, p. 11; Mirem Website (http://www.mirem.eu/datasets/agreements/).
56 Frontex. General Report 2009. Frontex, Warsaw 2010c; Frontex. General Report 2010.
Frontex, Warsaw 2011.
57 Frontex, 2010c, p. 27.
58 Council …, 2002, p. 8.
59 C. Dahlman and G. Ó Thuathail, “Broken Bosnia: Localized Geopolitics of Displace-
ment and Return in Two Bosn ian Places”. Annal s of the Associa tion of American G eogra-
phers 95(3) 2005: 64 4-662.
411
very successful in boosting its deportations policies, and that this has grave
consequences for migrants.
The border activities of Frontex and of Member States require extensive
funding, but this financial aspect of borderscapes is surprisingly under-ex-
amined. Yet, the reconfiguration of the European borderscapes has trans-
formed the European borders themselves into sites of vast profit and circula-
tion of funds. This is also reflected in the budget of Frontex itself, which
increased from €6.2 million in 2005, over €42 million in 2007 to around €90
million in 2010. Similarly, the Programme for Solidarity and Management of
Migration Flows has dispersed billions of Euros to activities such as deporta-
tions and border surveillance. The Solidarity Programme was also used to
fund the construction of the EUROSUR programme with €900 million, a pro-
gramme, which the European Parliament ratified in the fall of 2013. While
European media and politicians often summarily describe EUROSUR as an
“early warning system,” its development is useful to illustrate the current po-
litical dynamics in the EU borderscapes as well as some of the risks created
by this development.
The goal of EUROSUR is to construct a “common pre-frontier intelligence
picture” (European Commission 2011: 4) capable of providing full situational
and “real-time” awareness of cross-border movement by gathering informa-
tion about migrant mobility in third countries by integrating a range of con-
trol and surveillance technologies, including aerial and satellite images.
EUROSUR was outsourced to the German conglomerate ESG, who facilitate
this technological restructuring of the European borderscapes, via extensive
subcontracting to private security companies and the European weapons in-
dustry who introduced a wide range of new and advanced surveillance and
control practices to European border control. For instance, the participants
in the TALOS project (Transport Autonomous patrol for Land border Surveil-
lance system) include the Turkish electronic and military company Aselsan
and the Hellenic and Israeli aerospace industries and the project is subsidized
by the EU with €12.9 million out of €19.9 million. TALOS’ goal is to develop
high tech drones capable of tracking smugglers and illegal migrants. Another
60 Lemberg-Pedersen, M. “Private Security Companies and the European Borderscapes”,
in Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Ninna Nyberg Sørensen (eds.), The Migration In-
dustry: The Commercialization of International Migration. Global Institutions Series.
Routledge, New York 2013.
61 European Commission. Deter mining the tec hnical and oper ational fra mework of the Eu-
ropean Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) and the actions to be taken for its estab-
lishment. Commission Staff Working Paper. SEC(2011) 145 final. Januar y 28, 2011. Brus-
sels 2011.
412 14
example is the seaBILLA project, which involves Eurocopter, EADS, Thales
Defense, BAE Systems and Finmeccanica-subsidiary Aleania Aeronautica
(Sea Border Surveillance) and receives EU subsidies worth €9.8 million out
of the total project costs of €15.5 million. seaBILLA focuses on fighting boat
migration in the Atlantic and South Mediterranean Seas through unmanned
air systems and passive sensors.
From 2007 to 2009 the EU has supported 152 such advanced security pro-
jects through its 7th Framework Programme for Research. Many concern bor-
der control, while others develop biometric surveillance technologies to be
used for monitoring the populations of European countries. Frontex is also
involved in facilitating this military industrial restructuring of European
border control as the Agency’s Research & Development Unit participates in
several EUROSUR projects. Indeed, the Frontex R&D Unit was set up to facili-
tate “information exchange between border guard authorities, research insti-
tutes, universities and industry,” an exchange it actively promotes by arrang-
ing workshops where the security and military industry can demonstrate its
newest technologies, and also by participating in working groups in blurred
pub lic- privat e pol icy for ums, li ke the European Secur ity Rese arch Innovation
Forum (ESRIF). A recent amendment of Frontex’s mandate has meant that
the collusion of public and private interests have been intensified even fur-
ther, as the Agency no longer loans equipment from EU Member States, but is
allowed to build its own permanent pool of equipment.
The way in which the creation of Frontex, the systematization of deporta-
tions and the EUROSUR project have introduced a vast range of new control
measures into the Euro-African borderscapes, illustrates the pervasive na-
ture of the restructuring processes of the European borderscapes. As these
processes are shaped by powerful and overlapping political and commercial
interests, they have so-called lock-in effects, that is, self-reinforcing dynam-
ics, which are difficult to alter once implemented. The militarization and ex-
ternalization of European border control facilitated by the political desire to
avoid asylum seekers and to boost the European security and military indus-
try is premised on the externalized prevention of “illegal migration,” which
undermines attempts to find other protection-sensitive forms of border con-
trol.
Conclusion
The EU’s attempts to justify externalization as ensuring protection else-
where, ignores the fact that the cooperation with third countries has primar-
413
ily taken the form of boosting border infrastructures potent with the power
and force to coerce migrants. Practices such as externalized detention camps,
Frontex operations, Italian-Libyan push backs, “escorted deportations” and
EUROSUR’s common pre-frontier intelligence picture are all geared to pre-
vent immigration and contain migrants in regions bordering Europe. As the
countries bordering Europe are not interested in becoming dumping zones
for people unwanted by Europe, this has effectively created a transnational
system of interlinked exclusions where migrants are circulated between con-
trol nodes in different states.
The political will of EU Member States to secure the right of migrants
seems to be in short supply. In fact tracing the development of Europe’s ex-
ternalization of camps, interceptions and deportations reveals that the det-
rimental effects of the EU border system for migrants’ rights seems to be the
result of an active strategizing by European actors, illustrated by the North-
western Triade, and particularly by the British and German governments
considerations concerning the principle of non-refoulement. Accordingly, the
EU’s choices to close down legal channels of migration and boost the con-
trol sectors of repressive regimes in third countries have facilitated rather
than preempted the trend of irregular migration. That the Schily Proposal
was a transformative event in this respect, since it retained the Northwest-
ern Triade’s radical idea of mass deportations, but dropped the idea of allow-
ing access to European asylum procedures in third countries. Although the
European idea of exporting asylum obligation is very problematic in itself,
the Schily Proposal showed how European governments believed that even
such a policy would result in too many asylum claims. Accordingly, the shift
towards systematizing interceptions in international waters symbolizes how
the EU externalization agenda has turned its back to the ambition of creating
protection elsewhere.
I claimed that the EUROSUR programme illustrates how the political drive
to tighten the European border control has spawned a massively lucrative
borderscape industry. Here, private security companies and the European
arms industry receive substantial subsidies from various EU financial instru-
ments and work closely together with the Frontex Agency’s Research & Devel-
opment Unit to militarize Europe’s external borders. As the arms industry’s
desire to develop and sell evermore advanced control products is premised
on a notion of border control that is geared only towards excluding migrants,
this technological restructuring of the EU borderscapes directly undermines
any attempts to introduce more protection sensitive border control practices.
The testimonies of migrants having experienced the brutal conditions in
Libyan detention camps and the fact that thousands have drowned in the
414 14
Mediterranean are crucial indicators that the political drive to avoid asylum
seekers in Europe has created an abusive system of transnational migration
and border control. The EU borderscapes of the 21th century are thus char-
acterized by multi-local suffering as a system has been constructed, which
offers protection nowhere, and produces rights violations elsewhere.
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