MOBILE – Mobility Law Open Lab with Irina Fehr

Rethinking ‘crimmigration’: State-perpetrated crimes during EU migration control?

Guest presenter: Irina Fehr is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, studying the role of criminal law in migration control at external EU borders. 

Presentation: The ‘crimmigration’ scholarship studies the interplay between migration and criminal law, focusing on how people-on-the-move and migrant solidarity are increasingly criminalized as part of migration control efforts. However, the link between criminal law and migration control can also be found elsewhere; namely in the crimes committed by state officials during migration control, which largely go unpunished. I advocate for a more holistic understanding of the crime-migration nexus, integrating the (missed) opportunities of criminalizing state-orchestrated migration control practices into the scholarly debate.

Building on the concept of criminal selectivity (Vegh Weis 2017) and its core notions of ‘under- and over-criminalization’, I examine to what extent criminal law is invoked selectively according to state interests in the context of migration control. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the case study of external EU borders in Croatia, I discuss how criminal justice systems are relevant both for the (over-)criminalization of migration-enabling practices, such as migrant solidarity, as well as the under-criminalization of state-perpetrated border violence. Ultimately, this analysis adds to the theoretical foundation underlying the use of criminal law to hold perpetrators of border violence accountable, exploring a legal framework that has thus far been neglected in efforts to challenge illegal migration control practices in Europe. 

Time: 10 October 2024 14:00-15:15

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus + ONLINE

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