Regulating Migration and Asylum in the Maghreb: Which Inspiration for an Accelerated Legal Development?

During the last decade, the Maghreb States have experienced unprecedented legal developments around migration and asylum. Shortly, migration has turned from a social reality to laisser-faire into a political issue to address, a rapid shift which has mainly been spurred from outside. The multifaceted lack of preparation for such a challenge and the diplomatic importance of legislating have led to improvising a first set of normative production focused on strengthening criminalisation of border crossing. Since more recently, a new series of reforms have aimed at framing migration and asylum. While those dynamics have obviously been linked to the neighbourhood with the EU, they are also to be placed in the context of converging approaches and globalised discourses worldwide. Emulation of international and mostly EU foreign standards in the reforms, and singularly norms thereof which enable restrictive policies, has been representative of major trends in law diffusion. Law-making in the Maghreb has proved to be rooted in a multiplicity of cross-level influences, whose interaction has resulted in country-specific legal processes and options.