Pro-asylum Advocacy in the EU: Challenging the State of Exception

Abstract

This chapter explores examples of how pro-asylum advocates challenge the harsh measures used to punish those who try to enter or reside in the EU illegally, taking examples from The Netherlands and the UK. We explore organized resistance to the ‘3-Ds’, which are so typical of EU-wide migration policies: destitution, detention and deportation. Together these are the backbone of policies of deterrence. Sections 2 and 3 explore how ‘global apartheid’ and the ‘state of exception’ within the EU connect. Giorgio Agamben (2005) first theorized the “state of exception” and Kohler, “global apartheid” (1978). The state of exception is the regional context for pro-asylum advocacy work, and global apartheid is the global context within which the EU-wide state of exception can be understood (Webber 2000; Migreurop 2009)3. In section 4, the ‘shared injustice frames’, or common worldviews, of pro-asylum advocacy networks in the EU, are briefly explored.

In a landscape where the principle of deterrence is deliberately punitive, offering assistance becomes ever more problematic for an organization and for the individuals working within it, as the fight is not only for refugee rights but for resources and legitimacy (Cambridge/Williams 2004: 103).

History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.