Border Controls in Europe: Policies and Practices Outside the Law

Fran Cetti

doi:10.13169/statecrime.3.1.0004

Abstract

The forced migrant 1 to Europe is hostage to a tight “migration-security nexus”, 2 their conversion into a globally ubiquitous “illegal” presence facilitated by the incorporation of the global security industry into the region's system of external border controls. The European Union 3 not only outsources its border control activities to private security concerns (as well as third-party states), but also consults them on the direction of its policies, adopting their discourse and practices. It is using their expertise to meld member states' border technology into an apparatus of detection and deterrence that stretches far beyond the region to intercept forced migrants long before they reach its borders. The agencies that patrol on Europe's behalf outside its geopolitical boundaries also operate outside national legal structures, without regard to international human rights or refugee rights. Under cover of the privatization and securitization 4 of its immigration and asylum regime, the European Union acts with impunity in a parallel world of extra-legal 5 practices.

Highlights

Amnesty and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) (2010: 12) report that its “joint operations and pilot projects create a gap in accountability and potentially permit Member States to engage in border management with impunity”, and that it implements its “technical assistance projects” with third countries through diverting funds intended for humanitarian and development aid to border control (2010: 26)
As the formation and implementation of the European Union’s immigration and asylum policy is progressively outsourced by its secretive security committees to the powerful global security industry, it is of little surprise that its regime of border control is developing in such a way that it incorporates the personnel, technology and ethos of the private security sector, and mimics its organizational structure – undemocratic, unaccountable and highly secretive
The untrammelled, extra-legal power of the global security industry has infected all aspects of European border policy

Summary

Introduction

Researchers such as Bosworth 2008, 2012; Bosworth and Guild 2008; Green and Grewcock 2002; Grewcock 2009; Stumpf 2006; Weber and Bowling 2008 have initiated a critical analysis of the nation-state’s relationship to forced migration from the perspective of criminology, using the concept of “state crime” as a framework. Grewcock (2009: 36), for example, describes how state crime derives from the organized and deviant use of force diffused through the alienation, criminalization and abuse of unauthorized migrants. Denied any legal route into Europe’s nation-states, and criminalized by virtue of their unauthorized attempts to cross the border, the forced migrant is elided with that of other globally ubiquitous figures operating outside the law They are discursively linked to international criminal networks (by association with human trafficking/smuggling) and, if they come from Muslim-majority countries, to Islamic terrorism. Representatives of the global security industry have become incorporated into the core of the European Union’s border security and migration management systems: they coordinate research and development (R&D), but increasingly set up its think-tanks, provide its technology and the personnel to operate it, and participate in its special immigration advisory committees They play a fundamental role in setting Europe’s immigration and asylum agenda, helping direct its policy and manage its activities, and shaping its ideology, discourse and rationale. Given the European Union’s undemocratic institutional environment, it is not surprising that its system of border control has been able to incorporate the private security sector and adopt its undemocratic and opaque organizational structure

A Securitized Environment

Conclusion