Current PhD students and their projects:
The new Closed Controlled Access Centres (CCACs) on the Greek hotspot islands are yet another layer of racialised containment for people who seek to enter ‘Europe’. To access legal assistance, people must overcome material infrastructure and policies that simultaneously illicit a sense of pervasive social control and abandonment. In this thesis project, I contest prevailing legal imageries of a space created by EU law—to disrupt the movement of racialised and gendered mobility—as an essentialised and static exceptional or humanitarian space. Utilising intersectional and decolonial theory, the project considers that the work of law is under-evaluated in the epistemic ‘othering’ of immobilised women in the EU hotspots as ‘outside’ law whilst deeply entrenched in it. I therefore unpack the legal processes, conduct and counter-conduct on the hotspots to understand the experience of women on the hotspots as a legal struggle. The implementation, interpretation and violence of law is constantly reinventing itself and responding to the mobility of women at the border. Through a combination of critical legal theory, doctrinal analysis and empirical work, I generate knowledge with women previously immobilised on the islands and by doing legal advocacy on the hotspot island of Samos. Situating women as the focal point of this study, I attribute significance to the processes of inclusion for some—the exception-to-the-exception—from the exclusion of the ‘other’ as continuing and renewing social and rights stratification of (im)mobilised women.
The thesis aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the complex landscape of asylum border procedures within EU Asylum Law, with a focus on their impact on asylum seekers' mobility, access to rights, and procedural guarantees. It examines the historical evolution of border procedures in the Common European Asylum System, highlighting their expanding scope and legitimization in the new Asylum Procedures Regulation proposed in the context of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. The thesis also tries to theorise border procedures by incorporating critical border theories, such as the 'shifting borders' theory and the concept of the 'state of exception', to construct a framework explaining the legal fiction of 'non-entry' applicable in border procedures. Furthermore, through an empirical examination of border procedures, it critically assesses the compatibility of border procedures with human rights. Consequently, the research delves into important legal, theoretical and empirical perspectives explaining how procedural means such as those of border procedures are used in the EU as a means to justify reduced procedural safeguards and (im) mobility of asylum-seekers.
Throughout the last decade, thousands of refugees and migrants in distress in the Mediterranean have been prevented from entering European ports, through interceptions and summary expulsions (‘pushbacks’) at sea, aggressive deterrence and ‘pullbacks’ to other countries, and denials of post-rescue disembarkation requests. This thesis explores the possibility of understanding such restrictions of refugees’ and migrants’ port access as constituting unlawful violations of the prohibition of racial discrimination, under international and regional law. This project joins the growing legal scholarship on racial borders – as well as that more broadly of critical race theory and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) – which explores how border enforcement upholds and perpetuates racial discrimination, most often through facially neutral policies and border violence.
Marta is a Lecturer in law at the University of Exeter and a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London’s School of Law. Her doctoral project consists of an investigation on the ways in which political populism has expanded its reach to the criminal and immigration law domains. More specifically, the thesis looks at the contemporary phenomenon of “human smuggling”, critically examines the application of the anti-smuggling provisions to counter the rescue activities carried out by the NGOs in the Mediterranean area and examines the wider implications that the criminalisation of human mobility has for the foundations of criminal law and the Rule of Law at large. Marta’s interests include the criminalization of migration in Italy and Europe, the externalization of border controls and the expansion of jurisdiction, the Transnational Organized Crime framework on human trafficking and migrant smuggling and the impact of populism on the Rule of Law.
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The Central Mediterranean route serves as a symbol of human suffering, where migrants and asylum seekers risk their lives to escape political turmoil, conflict, crises, and poverty. Despite these harrowing conditions, EU member states have not remained idle; however, their responses have predominantly prioritized containment and deterrence of irregular migration over life-saving efforts.
This research examines how states' omission to render assistance to migrants and refugees in distress may engage their international responsibility. It delves into the treatment and legal effects of omissions under international law, encompassing general rules outlined in Articles on State Responsibility (ARSIWA), along with other relevant special regimes such as maritime law, international human rights law, and international refugee law.
By delving into the legal nuances of omissions within the context of search and rescue and employing a doctrinal approach complemented by empirical evidence, the research investigates whether and to what extent omissions can be configured in terms of State responsibility and how may questions of attribution and causation be dealt with in within maritime search and rescue context.
Puangrat’s doctoral thesis addresses the rollback of citizen status and the right of nationals to return during pandemics. It focuses on the case of Thailand and Thai nationals abroad. Thailand’s requirements for the certificate of citizenship status beyond a Thai passport, the return quota, and the immigration penalty could all add up to the substantiation of additional immigration measures imposed against Thais abroad. Despite the limited effectiveness of travel restrictions, the resort to those anti-pandemic measures has been allowed by pandemic laws at the international level. This thesis thus examines how far the pandemic legal regime has affected the right of Thais to return. Furthermore, the phenomenon of the inconvenient return due to the recourse to travel restriction by the states of nationality may arise in the case of Australians and Canadians. This shows the tendency of the global situation that the potential influence of pandemic laws includes the reshaping of the citizen status of nationals abroad to become temporary semi-citizens during pandemics.
Read more about Puangrat Patomsirirak.
Ayesha Riaz is currently pursuing a PhD at Queen Mary University of London whereby she is investigating the relationship between the British State and Solicitors that help asylum seekers in the UK. She also works as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich, School of Law. She previously worked at the largest legal aid firm in the UK and provided legal advice and assistance to those that are in vulnerable situations, such as detained and non-detained asylum seekers/victims of domestic violence and victims of trafficking.
This thesis examines the struggle for authority between UK asylum authorities and medical experts regarding the relevance of trauma-based illnesses to the determination of asylum claims. Two fields of expertise are engaged – medical diagnosis and asylum determination - which are in competition concerning the creation of knowledge and its consequences for those seeking asylum. The first part focuses on two issues: how asylum seekers’ immigration status determines their access to healthcare and how healthcare professionals accommodate these limitations with their duty to provide treatment. The second part analyses how the power to assess the mental health of asylum applicants for medical treatment and for immigration decision-making operates. This thesis therefore examines the coherences and discrepancies involved in these assessments which may have life or death consequences for those seeking asylum. The project uses a multi-disciplinary approach to analyse the relationship between law and medicine in the context of Refugee Law, with a combination of doctrinal and comparative approaches to law including international refugee and human rights law, domestic asylum law, asylum policies and mental health research.
Read more about Hasna Sheikh.
Recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of policy developments in the fields of migration and asylum, which aim to curb irregular migration towards EU countries and diffuse responsibility for possible human rights violations to third countries and private actors. This phenomenon, referred to, inter alia, as ‘offshoring and outsourcing of migration control’ takes a variety of forms including visa requirements, carrier sanctions, providing financial incentives to third countries, posting immigration liaison officers, and undertaking joint patrols on the sea.
The question of responsibility allocation in the context of these measures is important and topical because the plurality factor present in such situations makes it difficult to determine and implement international responsibility. Although international law incorporates some legal tools that have the potential to address questions of shared responsibility, it is argued that they fall short of providing tailored solutions for cases of joint and cumulative types of shared responsibility, where due to the indivisible nature of the harm, it is difficult to assign responsibility to individual contributors. Ceren’s research aims to identify limits and challenges, if any, imposed by prevailing principles and establish to what extent the principle of joint (and several) responsibility can be applied to extraterritorial/ privatised migration controls.
I examine in my PhD research the relationship between arbitrary power and the concept/rule of law in EU immigration law. I draw on political and legal theories about arbitrary power and law while exploring legal forms that characterise EU immigration law. I seek to appreciate how non-EU nationals may face the arbitrary exercise of power by national public authorities as facilitated by EU law.