Publication

This paper explores the growing nexus between external and extraterritorial policies in the development of the EU asylum and immigration policies. The author describes how from a legal point of view such developments and updated policies create a number of challenges for the EU in ensuring the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. The paper explains that the drive to move migration control and refugee protection to checkpoints located geographically outside of the EU area has become a strategic feature of the common asylum and immigration policy in which the individual states have instrumentalized the territorial principles to relieve themselves of international legal obligations in order to institutionalize a revised ethos of "protection lite."