Drowning By Numbers. EU Fundamental Principles Trashed By Immigration Policy

As a consequence of the crisis that evolved following the abolition of the Schengen area internal borders, the EU and its member states have adopted security norms and intensified police activities: inside the European territory, by tracking potentially undesirable individuals and, outside the European territory, by exercising border controls directly and indirectly within the territory of other states and international space. Therefore, two types of contradictions appear that reveal dialectical tensions whose implications on European juridical and political identity can be analysed.

The first are contradictions between home security preoccupation and human rights protection or, in other words, the distortion between a society of norms and situations of exception. The stress laid on the reinforcement of the control of exterior borders and the management of migration flows has induced orientations and legislation that have generated some limitations, even violations, of some human rights, that might not be derogate even in cases of exceptional crises (right to live, right to leave a country, right to asylum). The second are tensions between realities of an outsourcing of the EU border control and discourses on the defense of states’ sovereignty, that is to say the paradox of dismantling the essence of sovereignty in order to precisely prevent such disintegration. The EU and its member states have transferred the responsibility for monitoring borders, on the one hand, to neighbouring countries and, on the other hand, to private operators whose costs should be challenged. These contradictions question whether EU border control erodes European fundamental references.