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.

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 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 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.

International Migration Law in the Current Legal and Political Reality: Review of Research Handbook on International Law and Migration

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-145
Author(s):  
Tally Kritzman-Amir
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Mental States ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Migration Law

The complex human phenomenon of migration is a challenging one, and throughout history has been considered by many disciplines, including, but not limited to, law, international relations and political science, sociology and anthropology, philosophy, economics, geography and demography and psychology, as well as by multi-disciplinary scholarship. All of this growing body of scholarship has attempted to come to grips with particular aspects of this phenomenon, which has an impact on states, peoples, societies, spaces, cultures, mental states, international organisations and norms.

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.

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.

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 Olympic Movement in International Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 385-390
Author(s):  
Doriane Lambelet Coleman
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policies And Procedures ◽  
Olympic Movement ◽  
Standard Response ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
Domestic Law

The Olympic Movement has been self-regulated from the beginning, and its private ordering is governed by the domestic law of the nations in which its organizations are domiciled and operate. Nevertheless, it is also an institution of global governance, with important ties to international law. This essay examines the nature of those ties and the push for additional alignment between the norms of the Movement and international legal norms. I first provide a taxonomy of Olympic Movement organizations, centered on the attributes that are helpful to understanding the place of each in the global governance of sport and the value the organizations produce for their diverse stakeholders. I then describe demands from international law for additional alignment with human rights and governance norms and the standard response from sport. In the final section, I argue that regulatory autonomy is necessary for sport to produce the values expected by its stakeholders; domestic law, including as it reflects international law, is generally an adequate check on abuses of that autonomy. International norms are useful not as binding law that would displace the Movement's autonomy, but as pressure for Movement organizations to consider aligning their policies and procedures with the public interests those norms reflect.

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