Gregor Noll

Bio: Gregor Noll is an academic researcher from University of Gothenburg. The author has contributed to research in topics: Human rights & International law. The author has an hindex of 14, co-authored 69 publications receiving 896 citations. Previous affiliations of Gregor Noll include Lund University.

Negotiating Asylum : The EU Acquis, Extraterritorial Protection and the Common Market of Deflection

Abstract: How are access to asylum and other forms of extraterritorial protection regulated in the European Union? Is the EU acquis in these areas in conformity with international law? What tools does international law offer to solve conflicts between them? And, finally, is law capable of bridging the foundational oppositions embedded in migration and asylum issues? This work combines the potential of legal formalism with an analytical framework drawing on political theory. It analyses the argumentative strategies used by international lawyers, exploiting the interpretative methodology of international law as well as elaborate discrimination arguments. Taking the axiomatic tension between universalism and particularism as a point of departure, the author conceptualises the efforts to harmonise migration and asylum law in the European Union as the result of two interdependent negotiation loops: one taking place among Member States, and another between protection seekers and their host state. An extensive survey of the EU acquis and its institutional framework leads to the conclusion that both are heavily fragmented. The EU acquis contains not a single binding instruments securing the interests of protection seekers, while instruments enhancing migration control are fraught with legal and practical idiosyncrasies. Burden-sharing remains the pivotal element in the normative dynamics behind the EU acquis, and the various efforts of Member States to launch solidarity schemes are exposed to a critical analysis. After confronting the acquis with protective norms of international law, the author concludes that the deflection of protection seekers by means of visa requirements may constitute a violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, and that the prescriptions of international law oblige Member States to apply the Dublin Convention and the Spanish Protocol in a manner which ultimately empties the law of its main control functions. He also develops an explicatory model reconstructing the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in the field of extraterritorial protection. In the final part, the argumentative interdependencies between universalism and particularism are explored, and the author explains why the European Court of Human Rights must be regarded as the most legitimized forum for the negotiation of asylum in Europe. (Less)

Visions of the exceptional: legal and theoretical issues raised by transit processing centres and protection zones

Abstract: Since February 2003, plans by the UK government to deport asylum seekers arriving in the UK to \"Regional Processing Areas\" and \"Transit Processing Centres\" have gradually leaked to the public. While the former are located in the source region of the refugee crisis, and purport to be a contribution to strengthening reception capacities there, the latter are closer to the external borders of the EU, and represent a deterrent for unwanted migration, including that of asylum seekers. Essentially, the UK, Denmark and other supportive governments intend to geographically circumvent the individual rights flowing from the prohibition of refoulement in international law, and replace them with resettlement at the discretion of states. The present article seeks to demonstrate that the named governments are intentionally and proactively creating a permanent state of exception in the international refugee regime, in which legal and factual protection of certain classes of individuals is gradually done away with. Against the backdrop of Australian experiences, it is to be expected that the UK proposal will cost more than traditional asylum procedures on the territory of destination states, while offering less protection. This, in turn, exposes those groups of asylum seekers returned from a European asylum state to a Transit Processing Centre or Regional Protection Area to discriminatory treatment in violation of international law, concurrently raising issues under the prohibitions of collective expulsion. Furthermore, the massive use of detention in the absence of clear-cut guarantees on the availability of durable solutions or a repatriation alternative is likely to produce violations of specific human rights norms. From a practical perspective, the proposals are unworkable and ultimately unable to achieve their stated objectives. From a theoretical perspective, the initiative marks a shift towards the paradigm of the exceptional, where law and violence are no longer separated. Against the backdrop of totalitarian population policies in the early decades of the last century, European legislators should be slow to revert to the model of the camp, which remains the space that is opened when the state of exception is realized normally. Visions of the Exceptional

Rejected asylum seekers: the problem of return.

Abstract: During this decade the return of rejected asylum seekers has become an issue of increasing concern to major asylum states in the industrialized world. This article exposes the various political and legal approaches taken by returning states as well as the constraints emerging from human rights law. As a rigid control paradigm and related enforcement practices entail a considerable risk of human rights violations it seems reasonable to focus on measures enhancing the voluntary compliance of all actors involved with norms governing return. (EXCERPT) (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)

Seeking asylum at embassies. A right to entry under international law

Abstract: Is the processing of asylum claims at embassies and the grant of ‘humanitarian visas’ within the framework of Protected Entry Procedures a mere expression of the political benevolence on behalf of potential host states vis-a-vis protection seekers, or do both reflect legal obligations owed to the individual applicant? If so, does international law provide for a right to entry in such cases? In this article, the existence of a legally binding right to seek asylum encompassing an entry component shall be explored first together with the question whether any such right may have any implications on the practice of Protected Entry Procedures. Second, the relevance of explicit prohibitions of refoulement shall be explored together with implied protection norms of human rights law (to be found in the ICCPR, the ECHR and the CRC). The article concludes that the UDHR, the EU Charter, the CSR51, the CAT and the ICCPR do not offer any right of entry in the framework of Protected Entry Procedures. However, the ECHR and the CRC do contain an implied right to access under certain specified conditions. (Less)

Risky games? A theoretical approach to burden sharing in the asylum field

Abstract: Drawing on a game‐theoretical background, this article seeks to develop an analytical framework for explaining the problems an international lawmaker is faced with when crafting norms on the sharing of protective burdens in the asylum field, and to apply this framework to selected problems of burden‐sharing in EU asylum and migration policies. It focuses on the category of risk and casts burden‐sharing as a multi‐actor, multi‐level zero‐sum game, bringing together states and sub‐state entities as well as protection seekers. In doing so, a critical attitude to the inherent limitations of a game‐theoretical perspective is maintained.

The Deportation regime: sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement

Abstract: Acknowledgments vii Introduction / Nathalie Peutz and Nicholas De Genova 1 Part One. Theoretical Overview The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement / Nicholas De Genova 33 Part Two. Sovereignty and Space 1. Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens / William Waltes 69 2. Immigration Detention and the Territoriality of Universal Rights / Galina Cornelisse 101 3. Mapping the European Space of Circulation / Serhat Karakayali and Enrica Rigo 123 Part Three. Spaces of Deportability 4. From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportations across the Mediterranean Space / Rutvica Andrijasevic 147 5. Deportation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Anticipation, Experience, and Memory / Victor Talavera, Guillermina Gina Nunez, and Josiah Heyman 166 6. Engulfed: Indian Guest Workers, Bahraini Citizens, and the Structural Violence of the Kafala System / Andrew M. Gardner 196 7. Deportation at the Limits of "Tolerance": The Juridical, Institutional, and Social Construction of "Illegality" in Switzerland / Hans-Rudolf Wicker 224 8. Deportation Deferred: "Illegality," Visibility, and Recognition in Contemporary Germany / Heide Castaneda 245 9. Citizens, "Real" Others, and "Other" Others: The Biopolitics of Otherness and the Deportation of Unauthorized Migrant Workers from Tel Aviv, Israel / Sarah S. Willen 262 10. Radical Deportation: Alien Tales from Lodi and San Francisco / Sunaina Maira 295 Part Four. Forced Movement 11. Fictions of Law: The Trial of Sulaiman Oladokun, or Reading Kafka in an Immigration Court / Aashti Bhartia 329 12. Exiled by Law: Deportation and the Inviability of Life / Susan Bibler Coutin 351 13. "Criminal Alien" Deportees in Somaliland: An Ethnography of Removal / Nathalie Peutz 371 Part Five. Freedom 14. Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement / Peter Nyers 413 References 443 Contributors 483 Index 497

Abject Cosmopolitanism: the politics of protection in the anti-deportation movement

Abstract: The securitisation of migration in Western states has resulted in an array of restrictive laws and policies that raise important questions about the relationship between protection and the political. New technologies of control (such as detention) and strategies of exclusion (such as deportation) are rapidly undermining—indeed, effectively criminalising—national cultures of asylum. This article critically analyses how these measures are being contested and countered by the anti-deportation activism of undocumented non-citizen people in Canada. How are these campaigns re-casting the question of ‘protection’ in the face of deportation efforts by the Canadian state? This is a significant issue because the capacity to decide upon matters of inclusion and exclusion is a key element of sovereign power. In the case of asylum seekers, the ability to decide who will and will not be provided with protection is interpreted in this paper as a focal point where the state (re)founds its claim to monopolise the politica...

Shifting up and out: The foreign policy of European immigration control

Abstract: Traditionally a core aspect of state sovereignty, immigration control has first moved upwards to the intergovernmental sphere. It has then been brought closer to supranational governance, and is now gradually moving outwards towards the realm of EU foreign relations. This article interprets this move as the continuation of established patterns of transgovernmental cooperation in an altered geopolitical and institutional context. It explains internationalisation as a strategy of immigration ministers to increase their autonomy towards political, normative and institutional constraints on policy-making. Whereas these constraints were originally located at the national level, they are now increasingly perceived in communitarising immigration politics. The shift ‘outwards’ may thus be interpreted as a strategy to maximise the gains from Europeanisation while minimising the constraints resulting from deepening supranationalism. Yet this might in the long run also yield a widening of the external migration agen...

Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens

Abstract: Compared with refugee or immigration policy, the historical and political analysis of deportation is poorly developed. This paper suggests some lines along which critical studies of deportation might proceed. First, it argues that we can historicize and denaturalize deportation by setting it within a wider field of political and administrative practices. This is done by comparing modern deportation practice with other historical forms of expulsion. Second, the paper interrogates the forms of governmentality which invest the practice of deportation, and asks what they might tell us about modern citizenship. It argues that deportation can be seen as one key element in the international police of aliens.