Cosmopolitan Justice and Its Discontents by Bailliet Cecilia;Franko Aas Katja;

Author:Bailliet, Cecilia;Franko Aas, Katja;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cosmopolitan justice, then, in the sense intended here, is justice which greets the stranger without violence and offers her hospitality, rather than confinement to the marginalized spaces of Agamben’s camps and Davis’s slums.

6.1.2 The camp and the border

The stranger at the border is a figure who tests the limits of hospitality; the stranger at the border embodies in her person the dilemma of the universality of ethics and the particularity of law. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the right to leave one’s country, and also establishes as universal and fundamental, rights to life, freedom from torture and freedom from slavery. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has pointed out, however, that ever-tougher immigration policies in Europe which pursue narrowly conceived national interest rather than giving priority to protecting the human rights of migrants, violate the right to leave (Migreurop, 2010).

Most European and other Western countries have been highly critical of countries which make it difficult for their people to leave (Hudson, 2007). Although there was widespread celebration at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and although at the celebration to mark the twentieth anniversary of its destruction, European political leaders talked of the need to bring down other walls which divide cities, lands and peoples across the world, in fact there has been considerable activity in building walls – virtual and real walls – to protect their own borders. In Europe, the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melila in Morocco are surrounded by six-metre high fencing; the patrol boats in the southern Mediterranean and the wall of passport control barriers at the Shengen Area border in Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport demonstrate the building of walls. This wall-building is not only occurring at the borders of Europe: an actual wall has been built between Mexico and the USA, and destination countries such as Australia are also creating barriers by patrolling the seas around Indonesia and other places from which migrants are likely to come (Grewcock, 2007).

Europe has outsourced its migration control southwards to North Africa, and eastwards to Turkey and the Ukraine. The UK has also outsourced its migration control to countries such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. These contemporary borders are double walls, preventing both emigration and immigration. Rodier, in a report to the European Parliament, noted the use of the term ‘illegal immigration’ in a press release from a Conference of the Interior Ministers of the Western Mediterranean in May 2006, which welcomed ‘the efforts of the countries of the southern Mediterranean to contain illegal emigration to Europe’ (Rodier, 2006: 20). She also notes the arrest of 1,500 ‘potential emigrants’ by Senegalese authorities. to prevent them leaving for the Canary Islands. There has been no legal challenge to restrictions on the right to leave, and the right of states to control their borders is not questioned.

Migreurop (a Euro-African network of forty organizations from thirteen countries working on migration policy, EU externalization policies and their impact within and beyond the EU borders) reports the

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