LIMES – EU’s Shifting Borders
EU’s external borders are constantly shifting through externalization, i.e. the transfer towards non-EU countries of migration management and international protection responsibilities. EU’s commitment to refugee protection has therefore developed in tandem with attempts to ensure that few asylum seekers would be able to reach the territory of EU Member States to claim asylum. EU’s ambivalent approach to providing protection jeopardises the fundamental rights of those seeking it and puts into question EU’s commitment to global responsibility sharing and solidarity. At the same time, externalization also results in challenges for EU’s institutional framework and principles, especially competences and institutional balance.
More broadly, the EU continues to institutionalize externalization in its relations with third States, for example, through the introduction of negative conditionality between mobility/legal migration opportunities and control-oriented commitments, and through funding (e.g. EU Trust Fund for Africa). Migration management and protection obligations are often shifted to non-EU countries through soft law instruments in or outside the EU legal framework. This allows to eschew political accountability from the European Parliament, transparency and judicial oversight from the CJEU. Emblematic of this approach is the 2016 ‘EU-Turkey Statement’ in which the EU, the Member States and Turkey explicitly mentions commitments of the EU and its Member States towards Turkey as part of an externalisation cooperation ‘bargain’. With its hybrid legal content and diffused authorship, the instrument evades the EU procedural and institutional framework.
Against this backdrop, we invite doctoral project proposals that relate to the ‘mobility of persons’ cluster of LIMES and scrutinize the shifting of EU’s borders through externalisation and its implications. Envisaged areas of scrutiny include:
- the impact of key constitutional principles such as fundamental rights, the rule of law, and solidarity and fair sharing responsibility on EU’s externalisation project;
- the role of institutional actors such as the CJEU, the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament in shaping, operationalising and controlling EU’s externalisation project;
- how far the institutional framework of the EU and its structural principles (especially institutional balance, competences divide) guide the role between EU and Member States and frame the EU’s action in this field
- the legal implications of informalisation under EU and international law, i.e. the use of non-binding agreements and instruments to operationalise externalisation obligations
- the use of funding to pursue EU’s migration management objectives concentrating on issues such as its steering and solidarity potential, permissible aims, and management.
The researcher will be based at the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and undertake a 6 month secondment at the European Policy Centre (EPC) in Brussels, Belgium.