The Impact of Safe Third Country Policies on the Human Rights of Asylum Seekers: an Analysis of Actors’ Practices

Safe third country (STC) policies are policies designed to deflect asylum obligations on the basis that a certain country of transit is “safe” for some asylum seekers, as that they could have applied for and received protection there. European countries – just like the other countries from the Global North- started to develop STC policies by the end of the 80s, in the context of a general shift towards a more restrictive asylum regime and the development of an externalisation strategy. Today, almost all Western countries have some kind of STC policy, and the EU has since 2005 integrated the STC concept into its asylum legislation. Since their first appearance, scholars have been debating on the consistency of the STC concept with international asylum and human rights law, and warned against the human right risks that the use of STC policies might entail. As well, they have analysed the spreading of STC policies and assessed the suitability of existing STC schemes for sharing the refugee responsibility and delivering protection obligations. Not much interest has nevertheless been devoted to the way STC policies are concretely implemented. The scarce available information on their enforcement in EU countries shows, however, that the EU STC concept is applied very heterogeneously in member states, in each case in a particular context and in relation to a particular group of asylum seekers (AIDA/ECRE Country Reports 2022). This PhD research project aims exactly at filling this gap, by unveiling the concrete effects of EU STC policies on the human rights of asylum seekers. This paper outlines the theoretical framework in which the research is inscribed, which combines a relational approach to the implementation of migration policies (Jordan et al. 2003, Infantino and Sredanovic 2022) with practice theories (Adler 2008, Adler-Nissen and Pouliot 2014; Bueger 2014). The research will in fact focus on the interaction among different formal and informal groups of EU and member states public and private actors involved in the implementation of STC policies in three EU countries, on their organisational culture and on the practices that these groups develop and reproduce. By doing do, it aims at analysing how the action of and the interaction among these groups contributes to countering the human rights threats or circumventing the human right constraints which are inherent to the enforcement of EU STC policies.