Accessing Asylum in Europe: Extraterritorial Border Controls and Refugee Rights under EU Law

Migrant flows to the European Union (EU) have increased significantly in recent years, creating international concern over the fear of irregular migration, terrorism, territorial integrity, and sovereignty. These fears are by no means new and have influenced the formulation of the EU’s policy on external frontiers for several years. In fact, over the years, European border controls have been strengthened and reinforced in order to counter irregular migration through ‘integrated management’ of the EU’s external borders (p 27). The EU has, in fact, introduced a ‘net of extraterritorial measures aimed at controlling migration flows at all their stages’.1 This has meant that migrants who wish to travel to Europe face a manifestation of the external border on several occasions under different facades, such as offshore border checks, outsourced visa processing, privatized pre-boarding controls, and maritime interdiction, before arriving at the physical border, thus conjuring up images of a ‘Fortress Europe’ (p 41). For refugees seeking international protection, the system is thus ‘rendered inaccessible’,2 pushing them to seek alternative, often dangerous, routes.