Law and the Courts
Understanding how migration and criminal law work together to shape borders is a key thematic area for Border Criminologies. By working together in this thematic group, we aim to consider how the law and legal processes relating to migration and criminal justice intersect and the consequences this has for those crossing borders. More specifically, we examine how migration and criminal law operate to racialize particular groups and nationalities and how race, gender and citizenship overlap and accumulate to shape the everyday experiences of those caught up in crimmigration systems. We draw on critical legal scholarship including feminist and post-colonial scholarship and intersectional discrimination literature. We are interested in interrogating both the architecture of laws and policies that are developed and directed at controlling migration as well as the ways in which migration is illegalised and criminalized in new and familiar ways. We aim to examine how the law is enforced at a day-to-day level by police officers, border control agents and other actors to ensure the exclusion and control of those with uncertain citizenship and the role of transnational networks in developing, sharing, and facilitating these practices. We also aim to explore how and when the law is mobilized to challenge and resist migration policies as shown in the judicial review of the government’s policy to deport asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.
Our own work has looked ethnographically at how immigration tribunals for foreign national people involved in offending make use of police intelligence and the ways in which criminal law protections are circumvented when those without secure citizenship come before the courts. We have examined how the use and development of criminal law at the international level has been re-nationalised in ways that reinforce border control while animating and entrenching racialised mechanisms of social exclusion. In addition, close ethnographic and doctrinal work illuminates how international crimes intersect with exclusionary practices within both refugee law and immigration law. Finally, our research draws on feminist approaches to international human rights and refugee law, and legal theorising on intersectionality to analyse protection, discrimination, and the relationships between them.
We aim to bring together academics, practicing lawyers, activists, policy makers and civil society actors to collaborate to critically and constructively challenge legislation that criminalizes mobility. Our aim is to develop national and international networks through panel discussions and workshops, contributions to the Border Criminologies blog and collaborative writing projects. We also hope to put lawyers, practitioners, and academics in touch and hold events that allow these networks to grow.
Please contact Alpa Parmar (ap239@cam.ac.uk), Catherine Briddick (catherine.briddick@qeh.ox.ac.uk) or Nicola Palmer (nicola.palmer@kcl.ac.uk) for further information or if you would like to be involved with the group.