scholarly journals Transnational Mobility, the International Law of Aliens, and the Origins of Global Migration Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
Frédéric Mégret
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
The Law ◽  
Global Law ◽  
Migration Law

To speak of a “global migration law” is challenging, perhaps even quite provocative, in an era in which walls are being continuously erected at borders and seas transformed into mass graves. The ambition of international law often seems to be to rescue what can still be saved: the refugee regime for example, or minimally decent treatment of migrants once under the jurisdiction of a third country. A global law of migration, then, might be as much if not more the law of obstacles to human mobility than a body of law premised on a more fundamental commitment to freedom of movement.

scholarly journals Introduction to Symposium on Framing Global Migration Law – Part II

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 134-135
Author(s):  
Jaya Ramji-Nogales ◽  
Peter J. Spiro
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Control Approach ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Economic Migration ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
Migration Law

Part I of this symposium on framing global migration law introduced broad conceptual parameters of a new field, looking back to its international law roots and forward to a new orientation beyond the strictures of refugee law. Part II looks to situate global migration law along a range of theoretical dimensions. Jacqueline Bhabha establishes the continuities of human movement in a historical context, modern and premodern. Far from representing a radical departure, the current migration “crisis” is consistent with massive migrations over the ages. Tendayi Achiume considers migration through the lens of colonization and decolonization. Out-migration from Europe was a core economic element of the colonization project; Achiume suggests that contemporary migration from former dependencies to metropolitan powers will correct co-dependencies that continue to advantage postcolonial powers. Focusing Achiume's lens on the problem of human trafficking, Janie Chuang complicates the binary depictions of economic migration that underpin contemporary international law. She suggests that global migration law's grounding in a migrant-centered perspective could help state actors to understand the structural causes of modern-day exploitation, enabling a shift from a crime control approach to a human mobility paradigm.

scholarly journals The European Union and Migration: An Interplay of National, Regional, and International Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 509-513
Author(s):  
Iris Goldner Lang
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
International Law ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Member States ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Eu Member States ◽  
The Law ◽  
Migration Law ◽  
The Eu ◽  
Third Country Nationals

If global migration law “includes all levels of the law,” then the European Union represents the most developed instance of the interplay of national, regional, and international law. Migration law in the European Union involves the interaction of EU Member States’ national laws, EU regional law, and international law. This complex interchange of different migratory legal regimes is the consequence of diverse, and sometimes conflicting, objectives and interests of the Union and its Member States, and the nature of EU law itself. This essay explores the impact of these three levels of the law on the four migratory regulatory categories—EU citizens, “desirable” third-country nationals, asylum seekers, and all other third-country nationals—and the three objectives associated with these categories. The predominance of one legal regime over another varies depending on the regulatory category of migrants and the objectives associated therewith. While describing the existing legal systems, the essay outlines their attributes and shortcomings, the most prominent being: a clear rift between the rights granted to EU citizens and to third-country nationals; EU Member States’ determination to reserve to their respective national territories a high level of national control over labor migration; and significant deficiencies of the EU asylum law which were brought to the surface by the recent refugee influx into the EU.

The Contingency of International Migration Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-198
Author(s):  
Frédéric Mégret
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
The North ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
Default Position ◽  
The Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
Migration Law

This chapter reviews the complex contingency of international migration law. Freedom of movement was once the default position in international law, only to give way to a system that took it for granted that sovereignty entails the ability to restrict immigration. This startling transition is one that is largely forgotten and even at the time was hardly argued for, revealing an apparent case of ‘false necessity’ in which the law could seemingly have gone either way. In further prodding that transition, however, the chapter suggests that one should not fall into the trap of ‘false contingency’. The move to a concept of restrictive migration was, in fact, deeply conditioned by liberal international law’s obliviousness to its own imperial and racial biases. Understanding international law’s evolution requires us to understand how it absorbed imperial laws’ own experimentations with coerced and asymmetric mobility and the crumbling of Empires as spaces of imagined internal movement, notably as Southern bodies sought to move to the North. This can help us reexplore some of international law’s own earlier hesitations about transnational freedom of movement and develop an appreciation of how the flexibility of international legal discourse prepared the ground for exclusions to come. Reimagining the international law of migration would thus entail a radical reassessment of these imperial and racial biases.

Book III Privileges and Immunities, 13 Privileges and Immunities of Diplomatic Missions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Foakes Joanne ◽  
Denza Eileen
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Special Protection

This chapter provides an overview of diplomatic privileges and immunities. Two fundamental rules of diplomatic law—that the person of the ambassador is inviolable and that a special protection must be given to the messages which are sent to and received from the ambassador’s sovereign—have been recognized from time immemorial among civilized States. The law of nations—now known as public international law—required States which accepted foreign diplomats to guarantee rights necessary to enable them to exercise their functions, including independence from local jurisdiction. It was important that ambassadors should not be afraid of traps or distracted by legal trickery. As such, the chapter discusses several areas where these privileges and immunities occur: the premises of the mission, the diplomatic asylum, the exemption of mission premises from taxation, the inviolability of mission archives, freedom of communications, the diplomatic bag, and freedom of movement.

scholarly journals Human Mobility and the Longue Durée: The Prehistory of Global Migration Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 136-141
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Bhabha
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Human Migration ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Migration Law ◽  
Constant Element

The long history of human migration sets the stage for a probing engagement with current migration law and the challenges of bringing it into alignment with contemporary needs and rights. If very large scale movements of people are a constant element of life on earth, should we reconsider the migration panic that has gripped political leaders and their publics, and should we reassess the responses that are being advanced? Instead of crisis should we be talking of continuum, instead of restrictions on foreigner entry should we be considering support for human ingenuity and opportunity? Despite its scale, should we consider ways to extend to distress-migration the facilitatory infrastructure we routinely apply to business or service related human mobility?

scholarly journals The Contested Boundaries of Emerging International Migration Law in the Post-Pandemic

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 349-353
Author(s):  
Ian M. Kysel ◽  
Chantal Thomas
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
The Status ◽  
Transnational Civil Society ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Border Controls ◽  
Activist Movements ◽  
State Responses ◽  
Migration Law

One measure of how and whether the COVID-19 pandemic reshapes the emerging field of international migration law will be the extent to which transnational civil society and activist movements can counteract the intensification of state border controls that the pandemic has triggered. Before the pandemic, transnational efforts to establish a new normative framework for migration seemed to be accelerating. These efforts included new, if non-binding, global compacts on refugees and migration, and new, if modest, efforts at facilitating global cooperation, alongside innovative approaches to scholarly engagement. Such developments arguably contributed to an emerging framework for protecting migrants under international law. Has the pandemic defeated this potential? State responses to the pandemic have eschewed multilateralism, brought migration to a near standstill, and ignored well-established human rights obligations. Moreover, states are poised to deploy a range of new border management technologies and even more assertively manage migration in the name of “health proofing” borders. Yet at the same time, some progressive state practices have emerged alongside a call from the UN Secretary-General to “reimagine human mobility for the benefit of all.” In this essay, we chart some areas of potentially progressive expansion beyond the status quo, noting not only the substance but also the process by which these norms are emerging.

scholarly journals International Law

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Law Of Armed Conflict ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Order Part ◽  
International Obligations ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Investment Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Migration Law

International Law is a collection of diverse writings from leading scholars in the field that brings together a broad range of perspectives on all the key issues in international law. Featuring chapters written by those actively involved in teaching and practice, this fifth edition explains the principles of international law, and exposes the debates and challenges that underlie it. The book contains seven parts. Part I provides the history and theory of international law. Part II looks at the structure of the international law obligation. Part III covers the subjects of the international legal order. Part IV looks at the scope of sovereignty. Part V looks at responsibility. Part VI considers how to respond to breaches in international obligations. Finally, Part VII looks at the various applications of international law and explains issues relating to the law of the sea, environmental law, investment law, criminal law, human rights law, migration law, and the law of armed conflict.

The Law (and Politics) of Forced Displacement: Toward a History of the Present

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 111-115
Author(s):  
Itamar Mann
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
American Society ◽  
Migration Law

It is a tremendous honor being here today and participating in this esteemed panel on the “Law (and Politics) of Displacement,” which Jill Goldenziel has organized. I would like to share some research Umut Özsu and I are working on. This is a work in progress, but I still think its outlines are worth discussion, by way of historical background. I hope the project also demonstrates quite well why several of us at the International Migration Law Interest Group at the American Society of International Law have been thinking that migration should become more central to the discipline of international law; as central, say, as international humanitarian law.

scholarly journals The Possibilities of Global Migration Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Peter J. Spiro
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Full Range ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Migration Law ◽  
The U.S

When I started teaching international law more than twenty years ago, it was still possible to be an international law generalist. In the U.S. legal academy, the likes of Henkin, Schachter, Franck, and McDougal covered the full range of public international law subjects. (Some even managed to stay on top of private international law, too.) Today, being an international law generalist is impractical; it's simply too difficult to keep current with the breadth of international law. From the scholar's perspective, it's a case of “be careful what you wish for.” A generalist international law orientation used to be possible because there was so little of it, both on the ground and in the scholarship. Those mid-century saplings—the various distinctive fields within international law—have grown to mature oaks, and expert knowledge of their many crevices and branches is beyond the capacity of any single observer. Not only does international law defy individual mastery, but the level of specialization now makes it difficult to talk across these different areas. My colleague in international criminal law might as well be a domestic family law person for purposes of professional points of connection. We both attend the ASIL Annual Meeting, but we no longer really speak the same language.

scholarly journals The Multiple Levels of Governance of International Migration: Understanding Disparities and Disorder

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 153-158
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Awad
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Domestic Law ◽  
Migration Law

There is no corpus of law that is global in nature. Rather, “global” migration law is a collection of legal instruments situated at levels ascending from the subnational to the international levels. International law instruments contribute to the global governance of international migration at the international and regional levels. Two issues arise with respect to the effectiveness of these instruments: voluntary state accession and subsequent enforcement, even when states are parties to them. Domestic law regulates issues of international migration at the national and subnational levels. Enforcement is assumed to be more effective here. But this effectiveness varies according to the power of states, their levels of development and their capacities.

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