Description
The Safe Third Countries rule and practices (STC) plays a crucial role in the ‘extraterritorialization’ of asylum processing.
STC is the most advantageous political concept, specifically the ‘governmental’ device of keeping away migration from home-territories. States are able to effectively evade obligations and rules imposed by the international community, while limiting the critics of unlawful and illegitimate behaviour towards refugees and vulnerable migrants.
STC has mostly been researched by legal scientists in relation to the violation of international humanitarian/refugee laws. However, STC as a political concept is rarely examined in depth.
This paper conceptualizes STC as a ‘political’ notion and aims to elucidate the genealogy of STC as a governmental device.
Firstly, this paper argues that the establishment of STC is divided into two stages.
The first is the emergence of the notion of First Asylum Countries(FAC) until the early 1980s, which was considered as a possible way to organize ‘burden-sharing’ among relevant countries in the Indo-Chinese Refugee Crisis.
The second is the birth of STC based on FAC in Europe in the late 1980s/1990s, which aimed at ‘burden-shifting’ and developed the shared perspective of ‘transterritorial’ spaces between origin/destination states. This has paved a way for the externalization of border control.
Moreover, this paper makes two assumptions.
Beyond Eurocentrism, the 1970s/1980s saw knowledge (re-)production and the dissemination of novel ideas between Europe and other regions, including Asia/Africa, in the shaping of this unprecedented concept.
Next, its genealogy, facing ‘refugee crises’ from the 1970s up to the present, demonstrates why a global(regional) governance of 'humanitarian migration’ tends to fail; and why this has contributed to the restriction of migration/asylum policies rather than the improvement of global refugee protection.
This paper is based on social constructivist/Foucauldian theories. The research is conducted through the analysis of documents, including published/archival documents and parliamentary protocols.
