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Border Controls in Europe: Policies and Practices Outside the Law
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.
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Author and article information
Notes
Throughout the article, I use the term “forced migrant” to refer to those individuals who are driven by circumstances such as repression, war and/or poverty to seek personal safety and/or greater economic security in a richer, more stable country. This covers a wider range of people than the more narrowly defined terms “asylum seeker” or “refugee”.
Although the “migration-security nexus” is a term that has been widely used in academic circles concerned with refugee issues for some time, it has recently fallen out of favour with the UNHCR (see Crisp 2008), which regards it as too negative in connotation, with an overemphasis on migration from South to North. However, for the purposes of this article, I believe it remains a cogent aphorism for the way forced migration has become woven into the discourse and apparatus of security.
The article concentrates on the external border control policies of the European Union rather than on the variations manifest in each country – for a statistical analysis of the differences in openness of Europe's external borders according to country, see Hobolth ( 2012). However, such differences are increasingly subservient to a wider pattern of “convergence”, accelerated by the trend towards the technological integration of border security. Although each border has its own historically informed perspective on immigration and asylum, I concur with Green and Grewcock's (2002: 92–3) assessment that the major European countries act with an unprecedented “uniformity of … purpose” when it comes to border control, due to the foundational role it plays as part of a conscious project to construct a unified European identity. In few other areas of policy can the European Union claim to act as a unified “supra-state”.
“Securitization” refers to the introduction of practices beyond the norm (such as emergency legislation), in response to an existential threat.
I use the term “extra-legal” in the sense of not regulated by or accountable to the law.
The Stockholm Programme is a five-year plan for “European justice, freedom and security” running from 2010 through to 2015 (Europa 2009b).
José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, spoke of what he called “the dark side of globalization” in just such terms in a speech to the ECSA (European Community Studies Association) World Conference in Brussels in 2004 (Barroso 2004).
Biometric technology, such as fingerprinting, iris scans or voice recognition, is programmed to capture, store and recognize the distinctive physiological characteristics of individuals in order to verify their identity.
The recent Lisbon Treaty ( 2009) has been widely interpreted as a constitution in all but name. It amended the two treaties that form the constitutional basis of the European Union: the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the Maastricht Treaty (1993).
One example is that of the attempt to institute fingerprinting for children as young as six at European borders. This would have been rolled through as a “technical” part of deciding on a common visa format if it were not for a committed campaign that managed to bring the issue to light.
One example of the ever-increasing wealth of the security industry in the midst of a global recession is that, according to MarketsandMarkets ( 2012), global markets in biometric technology alone are estimated to grow from $4,213 million in 2006 to $11,229 million in 2015.
In the US, the Obama administration renamed the War on Terror “overseas contingency operations”. However, Leon Panetta, US Secretary of Defense until January 2013, recently revived its old title (Milne 2013).
The then-EU Commissioner Franco Frattini confirmed as early as 2007 that privatization and outsourcing are now central to European Union security policy: “Security is no longer a monopoly that belongs to public administrations, but a common good, for which responsibility and implementation should be shared by public and private bodies” (Frattini 2007).
In 2012 the European Union signed a Declaration Partnership with Libya's transitional government, confirming the country's cooperation in “joint patrols” and “information exchange” on “illegal immigration” in the Mediterranean (European Commission 2012).
The European Commission introduced this policy at the European Union's eastern borders in 2002: “The candidate countries will … be responsible for security at the Union's future external borders, the management of which will play a central role in developing relations with the future neighbouring countries, namely Belarus and Ukraine” (European Commission 2002).
The European Union has so far signed Mobility Partnerships with Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Cape Verde and Morocco.
Germany, for example, has returns and readmission agreements with many Eastern European and Balkan states, while Italy, Spain, Greece and France have similar arrangements with a number of Mediterranean and African countries (Cassarino 2010).
The UNHCR ( 2013) website speaks of a “pending” agreement with Libya's transitional government to formalize the agency's presence and activities in the country.
The European Union's security policy has been influenced by US programs which use algorithms that track and monitor factors that apparently indicate “mal-intent”, such as “body movements, voice pitch, eye movements, body heat, breathing patterns, blink rate and pupil rotation” (Statewatch 2012).
The technology that enables the collection of personal data of “unwanted” third-country nationals in the SIS II database was extended to visas in 2007: VIS stores the biometric fingerprints of all those who apply for visas to Europe.
One area of EU security research is dedicated to adapting combat robots that can intercept individuals crossing borders “illegally”. The remit of the 20-million-euro TALOS project is to develop and field test “a mobile, modular, scalable, autonomous, adaptive system for protecting EU borders”, comprising aerial and ground unmanned vehicles, supervised by a central “command and control centre”. It will field specifically adapted robots able to “stop illegal action almost autonomously with the supervision of border guard officers” (European Commission 2011b).
The term “interdiction” is never used in official discourse concerning Frontex, as this would leave it open to the charge of transgressing international maritime law that forbids such activity by nation-states in international waters. Instead, the term “interception” is used (Watson 2009).