Asylum procedures and reception in the new Pact: governing through exclusion and discipline

• In Event: The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum: Why Criminologists Should Care? (II)

Abstract

The paper identifies common trends embedded in the Pact on Migration and Asylum, and particularly in the new Asylum Procedure Regulation and the Reception Conditions Directive, by using the concepts of exclusion and discipline. The analysis of the legal provisions reveals how the Pact has strengthened a dual system of social control over asylum seekers through their exclusion from EU territory and the deployment of a set of punishing tools which bears crucial consequences for the effectiveness of the right to asylum.
The paper will examine, on the one hand, how exclusionary practices (such as pushbacks or confinement at the borders) are reinforced through the use of the legal fiction of non-entry; on the other hand, it will address the disciplinary mechanisms which shape asylum seekers' behavioral compliance, transforming international protection into a reward for obedience. While the disciplinary implications of the reception systems for asylum seekers in Europe are not a novelty, the paper will focus on the additional duties and requirements imposed on asylum seekers by the new legislative acts, in a system where non-compliance is punished through procedural obstacles and the impossibility to have their own asylum claims examined on the merit, and through the withdrawal of essential reception and integration services. By institutionalising practices of confinement at the borders, exclusion from the territory, and punishment for non-compliance with duties related to 'immobility', the Pact has further strengthened the trend towards the re-conceptualisation of asylum seekers as subjects requiring control and punishment rather than protection and rights. This reinforcement occurs not through state practices or national law, but through a new set of legal provisions which have normalised and harmonised, at an EU level, previously unlawful practices.

Author

• Eleonora Celoria, University of Turin