Description
This paper aims to highlight historical decisions and actions undertaken to increasingly securitise EU’s refugee and asylum policy in detriment to the defense of human rights with a view to disembed such practices from an ethical imperatives perspective.
Indeed, ever since the inception of the Schengen Area in the mid-eighties, we can observe this trend in key turning points related to the creation of the Free Movement of Persons in the Community. This apparent ‘community-building’ tectonic shift implied a push towards the elimination of internal frontiers and a focus on external borders, which resulted in an ever less humanitarian approach to refugees’ fundamental rights.
However, this radical paradigm shift did not go uncontested, as it can be observed on how the European Parliament (EP) opposed these changes by denouncing the Council and the Commission’s perspective on the Convention applying Schengen. Very remarkably, the Convention made no reference whatsoever to the ‘European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms’, even though article 28 of the Convention applying the Schengen Agreement expressly confirmed the obligations deriving from the Geneva Convention and New York Protocol, as well as the obligation to cooperate with the UN Commission for Refugees. Plus, the EP called on the Commission and the Council to adopt a democratic and humanitarian asylum policy capable of dealing with the international dimension of problems associated with refugee issues, to be guided by the UN Convention of 1951 and its the Supplementary Protocol of 1967.
These are just some few examples of how in eliminating the internal frontiers of the signatory Schengen States and transferring them to the external frontiers created fresh difficulties for refugees and migrant workers by imposing suffocating legislative restrictions opon them.
In short, this contribution aspires to fill the gap on how the knowledge of historical normative legacies, dissent and projected alternatives can empower current evidence-based decision-making on transnational mobility and human rights in the specific field of EU asylum policy-making.
