The legitimising role of fundamental rights and forced return monitoring in deportations?

Stemming in large part from serious injuries and deaths from the 1990s to mid-2010s, there have been significant changes to deportation practices in Europe, including discursive commitments to fundamental rights through common guidelines, standards and directives and the establishment of forced return monitoring systems in Frontex and most EU states (FRA 2023). These developments have also coincided with renewed and ever-increasing emphasis on deportation by the EU and its member states. In many cases, fundamental rights and the use of monitoring are linked to the larger political project of improving the ‘effectiveness’ of deportations. This paper interrogates these dynamic, focusing on the potential legitimising role of fundamental rights and forced return monitoring in deportation. My argument is twofold. First, I argue that incorporation of monitoring and fundamental rights has helped governments and EU institutions like Frontex legitimise and expand deportation practices, including the enforced removal of families, by 1) offering a shield against criticism without affecting underlying goals of increased removals, and 2) redirecting attention away from moral-political questions to ones of ‘best practices’ and procedures. Second, I argue that this procedural focus shifts moral-political conflicts ‘to the backstage of bureaucratic administration’ (Wittock et al. 2021), where officials involved in deportation are, at least in some cases, the ones grappling with them. Here I aim to add to the rich body of research on historical (e.g., Adamson and Greenhill 2023; Iğsız 2018) and contemporary uses of humanitarian and rights-based logics to support restrictive border controls (Pallister-Wilkins 2015, 2022; Lemberg-Pedersen 2021) by empirically investigating the links and effects on implementers – the people ‘working at the sharp end of border enforcement’ (Loftus 2015:115). How do fundamental rights shape escorts and monitors’ understandings of deportation and their role in the process? What are the implications of this? Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews (2022-2023) with mid- and street-level actors, I find consideration of rights and ‘best treatment’ can help them rationalise and cope with the morally difficult work of deportation – providing some sense of legitimacy on an individual level. Yet, at the same time, I also find discontent, contradictions, and ambiguity around deportations and their role, including a sense of futility and view that they are doing the ‘dirty’ work of governments. I conclude by reflecting on what these insights, and the moral and emotional ‘worlds’ of implementers, can tell us about the effects of fundamental rights and monitoring on state power and deportation at multiple levels.