'Hostile Environment': a Study of Immigration Control at the UK-France
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1 EXPERIMENTING, EXPORTING AND OUTSOURCING THE ‘HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT’ - A STUDY OF IMMIGRATION CONTROL AT THE UK-FRANCE FRONTIER Frances Timberlake 665765 This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA in Human Rights Law of SOAS, University of London. Date of submission: 8 September 2019 Word count: 12387 Declaration I have read and understood the School Regulations concerning plagiarism and I undertake: That all material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part by any other person(s). That any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the dissertation That I have not incorporated in this dissertation without acknowledgement any work previously submitted by me for any other module forming part of my degree. 2 Table of Contents ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................ 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................................... 3 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 5 1. THE SYSTEMS BEHIND THE ZONE OF DETERRENCE ............................................................................ 7 1.1 Geopolitical significance of Calais and Dunkerque ................................................................... 7 1.2 Legal system .............................................................................................................................. 7 1.3 Rationale ................................................................................................................................... 9 2. IMPLEMENTATION OF THE ‘HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT’ ABROAD ...................................................... 12 2.1 Hostile living conditions & ‘politics of exhaustion’ ................................................................. 12 2.2 Securitised zone ...................................................................................................................... 15 2.3 Surveillance ............................................................................................................................. 16 2.4 Policing .................................................................................................................................... 18 2.5 Detention ................................................................................................................................ 20 3. LEGAL OUTCOMES ............................................................................................................................ 23 3.1 Migrant ‘illegality’ ................................................................................................................... 23 3.2 Legal grey zone ........................................................................................................................ 24 3.3 Extraterritorial jurisdiction ...................................................................................................... 25 3.3 Accountability under refugee and human rights law ............................................................. 27 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................................... 32 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................... 33 3 ABSTRACT Despite increasing academic interest in the impacts of externalised border controls in recent years, the UK’s ‘exportation’ of its border into France has received relatively little attention. A set of bilateral legal agreements gave implemented juxtaposed controls on British and French territory. These have resulted in a blockage of prospective asylum seekers on the Northern French coastline, faced with extremely hostile living conditions, structural violence and a denial of access to UK asylum procedures. This paper argues that these impacts of the juxtaposed controls act as modes of UK immigration control through deterrence and removal, prefiguring the domestic ‘Hostile Environment’ in 2012. The practise of deflection from the border constitutes collective expulsion, denies the right to remedy and may risk refoulement. Given the extension of UK jurisdiction into France through the exercise of administrative and legal control, the UK should be held legally accountable for this. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In honour of all those blocked at the border, whose migration pathways have been curtailed by walls and wire. All those who even when caught in control zones, refuse to be controlled. And each of those, like Mawda, whose death came at the hands of the UK border regime. With thanks to the friends who offered support and encouragement throughout. Particularly Luke, whose interest and investment provided so much of the insight in this work. 4 ‘We are illegal, because you wrote the rules’. – Tewodros Aregawe, Syed Haleem Najibi, Goitom Fesshaye, Emirjon Hoxhaj1 ‘It would be more honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime’. – Giorgio Agamben2 ‘We want to extend the concept of exporting our borders around the world’. – UK Home Office3 1 Phosphoros Theatre Company, ‘Pizza Shop Heroes’ (Theatre performance, London, 21 June 2019). 2 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (tr Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press 1998) 171. 3 Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’ (StateWatch, 2007) 11 <http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/jan/uk-borders-id-card-plan.pdf> accessed 8 September 2019 (Home Office 2007). 5 INTRODUCTION State experiments with immigration control are not new. They have however proliferated in recent decades, with governments trying out increasingly harsh methods to dissuade and prevent ‘undesirable’ migration onto State territory. The UK’s own moves to criminalise immigration under the Blair government4 and May’s later implementation of a ‘Hostile Environment’ for undocumented migrants rightfully gained notoriety.5 Even prior to this, however, the UK was experimenting with sovereign border control beyond its own territory. Since the 1990’s it has gradually exported and outsourced its border into French territory through a set of bilateral agreements known as ‘juxtaposed controls’. These have allowed for British immigration checks to take place beyond British territory on the French coastline and later expanded inland as far as Brussels and Paris. The juxtaposed controls and successive bilateral border agreements have made of the Northern French coast a ‘buffer zone’ with a tripartite immigration control strategy – prevention, dissuasion and removal. Presented under the auspices of ‘border security’ and ‘crime prevention’, the juxtaposed controls are in fact ‘the very source of insecurity and lack of safety for hundreds of displaced people in the Northern France area’.6 They have served to create a harshly enforced zone of ‘deterrence’7 acting as a precursor to the UK’s own domestic ‘Hostile Environment’ policy. Daily life for exiles in the area has been made intolerable, through the perennial destruction of makeshift camps and denial of such basic rights as shelter, food and sanitation. The proliferation of security and surveillance technology across the region, often operated by outsourced private companies, has created a zone of containment and insecurity for those inhabiting it. A reinforced police presence has not decreased ‘illegality’ but rather helped to produce it, with subtle forms of biopolitical governance pushing exiles further into clandestine and invisibilised living situations. This essay proposes to examine not only the result of this ‘illegalisation’ of undocumented migrants8 on the Northern French coastline but also the legal processes behind it. The first section looks at the development of the juxtaposed controls and subsequent bilateral border agreements through a critical lens, seeing them as driven by the UK’s aim to control and reduce undocumented immigration by the exportation of its border controls. The second section examines the implementation of this zone of deterrence through the imposition of hostile living conditions, heightened security and surveillance measures, harsh policing and offshored detention practices. By focusing on the impact on exiles living in the coastal region it hopes to draw attention to the daily human rights violations that have been taking place for over two decades as a result of the UK’s externalised immigration controls. The final section considers the legal impacts of the border arrangements, such as the projection of 4 Corporate Watch, The UK Border Regime (Corporate Watch 2018) 20-23. 5 Liberty, ‘A Guide to the Hostile Environment’ (Liberty, 2019) <https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/sites/default/files/Hostile%20Environment%20Guide%20%E2%80%9 3%20update%20May%202019_0.pdf> accessed 8 September 2019 (Liberty 2019). 6 Marta Welander, ‘Britain’s Juxtaposed borders: The Human Consequences’ (Border Criminologies, 3 September 2019) <https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-