Since its launch in 1995, the majority of personal data held in the Schengen Information System (SIS) concerns third-country nationals to be refused entry to the Schengen territory. This study reveals why the use of the SIS (and the second generation SIS or SIS II) entails a risk to the protection of human rights such as the right to privacy and the right to data protection, but also the freedom of movement of persons and the principle of non-discrimination. This study describes the implementation of the SIS in respectively France, Germany, and the Netherlands and the available legal remedies in both data protection and immigration law. On the basis of three general principles of European law, minimum standards are developed for effective remedies for individuals registered in the SIS, but also other databases such as Eurodac or the Visa Information System.
How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration? As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. This is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future.
The contested creation of free movement—for people and goods—in the Schengen area of Europe Europe is a place of free movement among nations—or is it? The Schengen area, established in 1985 and today encompassing twenty-nine European countries, allows people, goods, and capital to cross borders without restraint. Schengen transformed European life, advancing both a democratic project of transnational citizenship and a neoliberal project of international free trade. But the right of free movement always excluded non-Europeans, especially migrants of color from former colonies of the Schengen states. In Europe without Borders, Isaac Stanley-Becker explores the contested creation of free movement in Schengen, from treatymaking at European summits and disputes in international courts to the street protests of undocumented immigrants who claimed free movement as a human right. Schengen laid the groundwork for the making of a single market and the founding of the European Union. Yet its emergence is one of the great untold stories of modern European history, one hidden in archives long embargoed. Stanley-Becker is among the first to have access to records of the treatymaking—such as letters between France’s François Mitterrand and West Germany’s Helmut Kohl—and Europe without Borders offers a pathbreaking account of Schengen’s creation. Stanley-Becker argues that Schengen gave a humanist cast to a market paradigm; but even in pairing the border crossing of human beings with the principles of free-market exchange, this vision of free movement was hedged by alarm about foreign migrants. Meanwhile, these migrants—the sans-papiers—saw in the promise of a borderless Europe only a neocolonial enterprise.
Principally, this book comprises a conceptual analysis of the illegality of a third-country national's stay by examining the boundaries of the overarching concept of illegality at the EU level. Having found that the holistic conceptualisation of illegality, constructed through a combination of sources (both EU and national law) falls short of adequacy, the book moves on to consider situations that fall outside the traditional binary of legal and illegal under EU law. The cases of unlawfully staying EU citizens and of non-removable illegally staying third-country nationals are examples of groups of migrants who are categorised as atypical. By looking at these two examples the book reveals not only the fragmentation of legal statuses in EU migration law but also the more general ill-fitting and unsatisfactory categorisation of migrants. The potential conflation of illegality with criminality as a result of the way EU databases regulate the legal regime of illegality of a migrant's stay is the first trend identified by the book. Subsequently, the book considers the functions of accessing legality (both instrumental and corrective). In doing so it draws out another trend evident in the EU illegality regime: a two-tier regime which discriminates on the basis of wealth and the instrumentalisation of access to legality by Member States for mostly their own purposes. Finally, the book proposes a corrective rationale for the regulation of illegality through access to legality and provides a number of normative suggestions as a way of remedying current deficiencies that arise out of the present supranational framing of illegality.
In recent years, many breaches of immigration law have been criminalised. Foreign nationals are now routinely identified in court and in prison as subjects for deportation. Police at the border and within the territory refer foreign suspects to immigration authorities for expulsion. Within the immigration system, new institutions and practices rely on criminal justice logic and methods. In these examples, it is not the state that controls the national border: instead, it is often privately contracted companies. This collection of essays explores the growing use of the private sector and private actors in border control and its implications for our understanding of state sovereignty and citizenship. Privatising Border Control is an important empirical and theoretical contribution to the growing, interdisciplinary body of scholarship on border control. It also contributes to the academic inquiry into the growing privatisation of policing and punishment. These domains, once regarded as central to the state's police power and its monopoly on violence, are increasingly outsourced to private providers. With contributions from scholars across a range of jurisdictions and disciplines, including Criminology, Law, and Political Science, Privatising Border Control provides a novel and comparative account of contemporary border control policy and practice. This is a must-read for academics, practitioners, and policymakers interested in immigration law and the growing use of the private sector and private actors in border control.
Since the Snowden revelations, the adoption in May 2016 of the General Data Protection Regulation and several ground-breaking judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union, data protection and privacy are high on the agenda of policymakers, industries and the legal research community. Against this backdrop, Data Protection and Privacy under Pressure sheds light on key developments where individuals’ rights to data protection and privacy are at stake. The book discusses the persistent transatlantic tensions around various EU-US data transfer mechanisms and EU jurisdiction claims over non-EU-based companies, both sparked by milestone court cases. Additionally, it scrutinises the expanding control or surveillance mechanisms and interconnection of databases in the areas of migration control, internal security and law enforcement, and oversight thereon. Finally, it explores current and future legal challenges related to big data and automated decision-making in the contexts of policing, pharmaceutics and advertising.
This edited volume examines the continued viability of international human rights law in the context of growing transnational law enforcement. With states increasingly making use of global governance modes, core exercises of public authority such as migration control, surveillance, detention and policing, are increasingly conducted extraterritorially, outsourced to foreign governments or delegated to non-state actors. New forms of cooperation raise difficult questions about divided, shared and joint responsibility under international human rights law. At the same time, some governments engage in transnational law enforcement exactly to avoid such responsibilities, creatively seeking to navigate the complex, overlapping and sometimes unclear bodies of international law. As such, this volume argues that this area represents a particular dark side of globalisation, requiring both scholars and practitioners to revisit basic assumptions and legal strategies. The volume will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of international relations, human rights and public international law.
The volume brings together contributions that reflect on issues about migration in terms of the countries of immigration: ways of “reception“. It is underlined in all contributions that effective humanitarian legislation can only be implemented together with a deep understanding of the problems faced by refugees/asylum seekers and the social relations that determine their position in society. Mehmet Okyayuz, grown up in Gemany, studied political science, philosophy and sociology in Paris, Berlin and Heidelberg. MA from Heidelberg and Doctorate in Marburg. Since 1995 he is teaching at ODTU in Ankara, focusing on political theory, history of labour movement, policy analysis and migration. Peter Herrmann, Dr. phil (Bremen, Germany), Studies in Sociology (Bielefeld, Germany), Economics (Hamburg, Germany), Political Science (Leipzig, Germany) and Social Policy and Philosophy (Bremen, Germany), is currently academic director at the European Observatory on Social Quality (EOSQ at EURISPES), Rome, Italy, adjunct professor at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF), Department of Social Sciences (Kuopio, Finland) and associate honorary professor at Corvinus University (Budapest, Hungary). Claire Dorrity comes from a background in Nursing and Social Care. She completed her Bachelor of Social Science degree at University College Cork (UCC) in 2001. She is currently working as a lecturer in School of Applied Social Studies, UCC where she is also undertaking her PhD. Claire is also the Nursing Studies Co-ordinator in the School of Applied Social Studies and also contributes to teaching on the BSW programme.
Immigration and Privacy in the Law of the European Union: The Case of Information Systems examines the privacy challenges posed by the establishment and operation of pan-European centralised databases processing personal data of different categories of third-country nationals.
This research questions the seemingly ossified premise that states have an absolute discretion to control international migration. Applying Max Weber’s theories of legitimacy, it determines that while states have certain traditionally legitimate functions, migration control, as distinct from the determination of citizenship, is not one such function. Measures of migration control must thus be justified on a rational-legal basis, that is, on a minimal evidential basis. Acknowledging the many obstacles states face in carrying out this legitimising exercise, it is suggested that a supranational approach at the regional level is the most sustainable long-term model, with an ultimate aim of achieving inter-regional cooperation on migration management on the basis of equality between regions.
