Abstract
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on migrants and refugees the world over. Their pre-existing vulnerabilities were immediately exacerbated as national health systems were often overwhelmed and many disease control measures were either inaccessible to them or had disproportionate socio-economic effects. But migrants and refugees have also been framed as prima facie causes for the transboundary spread of the virus, and public health exception and derogation clauses in both national and international refugee and human rights instruments have been used to block their entry, suspend asylum processing, or trigger deportations. Taking the example of Brazil as a point of departure, the present contribution argues that (for at least some states) the appearance of the virus seems to have served as a legal carte blanche for fundamentally reconfiguring or closing down border regimes. More specifically, we argue that the strategic mainstreaming of global health regulations into border regimes points to the emergence of a “pandemic law” that encroaches upon already fragile transnational legal regime complexes, with the potential to upend or hollow out existing frameworks for migrant and refugee protection.
Highlights
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on migrants and refugees the world over
We argue that the strategic mainstreaming of global health regulations into border regimes points to the emergence of a “pandemic law” that encroaches upon already fragile transnational legal regime complexes, with the potential to upend or hollow out existing frameworks for migrant and refugee protection
For a government otherwise at the forefront of COVID-negationism, World Health Organization (WHO)-mandated disease control measures seemed to offer themselves as a powerful tool to undermine international human rights and refugee law
Summary
COVID-19 has hit Brazil hard, both in terms of infection and mortality rates and in relation to the immediate and foreseeable mid- and longer-term economic consequences.[1] In the context of migrants and refugees, the government appears to have embraced the pandemic as offering a new legal passageway enabling the circumvention of both international law and domestic obligations relating to refugees and migrant populations. Brazil’s federal government quickly identified internationally sanctioned public health exceptions—both in the national Migration Law and in Article 33.2 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees—as presumptive grounds for not just border closures and summary deportations of migrants and refugees without regard for the non-refoulement principle. For a government otherwise at the forefront of COVID-negationism, World Health Organization (WHO)-mandated disease control measures seemed to offer themselves as a powerful tool to undermine international human rights and refugee law.
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