The EU external border as a site of preventive (in)justice

Abstract

The aim of the article is to fill a gap in the literature on the externalisation of immigration control by focusing not on practices of extraterritorial immigration control but on the externalisation of immigration control at the EU external border. The article will examine four parallel and inter-related trends of preventive injustice on the border: the denial of law and pushbacks, and their handling by judicial authorities and EU institutions and agencies; the emerging framework of the instrumentalisation of migration; the normalisation of border procedures based on the fiction of ‘non-entry’; and detention of third-country nationals at the border, to back up non-entry policies. The article will highlight the rule of law deficit such externalisation entails.