The New Pact on Migration and Asylum: From Organised Hypocrisy to Structured Dehumanisation

EU Migration management has longed been securitised and ‘crisified’, with the place of fundamental rights progressively diluted. While, in the aftermath of the ‘refugee crisis’, the Commission’s ambition, at least at the rhetorical level, was to offer a ‘fresh start’ and a more ‘humane’ migration and asylum system, this has morphed into a vision of ‘pragmatism’ to overcome policy deadlock. All instruments of the New Pact contain fundamental rights clauses. Yet, the operational detail is opaque and contradictory. While e.g. access to protection is supposedly maintained, a host of provisions on pre-screening, border procedures, and offshoring to third countries, make it ineffective in practice. The gap between declared principles and the practical-political constraints to which the EU is confronted has been theorised as a case of ‘organised hypocrisy’ (Lavenex 2018). The so-called ‘capabilities-expectations gap’ is considered a by-product of attempts at reconciling conflicting demands imposed by the contradicting normative and technical environments within which the EU operates. What this paper argues, however, is that the upcoming reforms launch a new paradigm of ‘structured dehumanisation’, whereby the gap between discourse and action is progressively closed. But rather than approaching law to principle or redressing malpractices, this is achieved by attempting a reformulation of the relevant rules. The instrumentalisation of migration package poignantly illustrates the move. It is not only that the disconnection between fundamental rights discourse and migrants’ human rights realities on the ground will be furthered by the New Pact. The reforms will openly entrench hostility and violence through the legalisation of human rights violations (framed as permissible ‘exceptions’ from the supposed general norms whose application will become near-impossible). The gap between rhetoric and practice will thus be closed by the New Pact, ending ‘migration hypocrisy’, but at the cost of EU values and founding principles in this domain.