Externalisation and Rightlessness

This research project investigates how international refugee law enables the rightlessness of refugees affected by externalisation measures. States worldwide increasingly seek to outsource practices and procedures in asylum and migration control beyond their borders. These include, for example, measures to carry out asylum procedures outside the national territory or to enable actors in other countries to prevent migratory movements. Research in international refugee law is now focusing intensively on this phenomenon of externalisation. It often focuses on demonstrating the illegality of attempts by states to restrict access to asylum. In this project, however, we consider externalisation from the complementary perspective of rightlessness. With this term, the political theorist Hannah Arendt pointed to a dilemma that a worldwide legal order shaped by nation states creates: people who lose the protection of their country of origin also lose their rightful place in the world. International refugee law was established to address this very issue by providing people with a secure legal status elsewhere. However, initial research on specific geographical and legal circumstances shows that persons affected by externalisation measures can be exposed to rightlessness despite extensive progress in international law. This research project aims to comprehensively understand the role of refugee law in rendering refugees rightless in the context of externalisation. To this end, it considers the conceptual foundations, operating principles and content of international refugee law in the context of a broad range of externalisation practices worldwide. In particular, it focuses on identifying possible deficiencies in the foundational structure of the law. The theoretical and analytical framework developed by the project can contribute to broadening the perspective of the scientific examination of the phenomenon of externalisation. It can enable the recognition, definition, and explanation of situations in which people are excluded from the pale of the law. This project is being carried out by a team of researchers led by Adel-Naim Reyhani at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights.