The EU’s Human Rights Responsibility Gap

Can the European Union (EU) be held legally responsible for its contributions to human rights harms in its Integrated Border Management? Or do systemic legal design flaws in the EU's human rights responsibility regime give rise to a significant responsibility gap?

This book delves into these pressing questions, offering a transversal analysis of applicable legal frameworks under international and EU law. Divided into three parts, the book first exhumes the international and EU human rights responsibility frameworks, revealing both ‘normative incongruency’ as well as ‘liability incongruency’. Part Two applies these frameworks to specific illustrations within the four tiers of the EU’s Integrated Border Management, exposing the critical points where responsibility falters. Building on these findings and drawing from shared responsibility and relationality theories, Part Three introduces 'Relational Human Rights Responsibility,' as an alternative method to ascertaining human rights responsibility of the EU specifically, and international organizations more generally.

Dr. Joyce De Coninck

Dr. Joyce De Coninck is an FWO post-doctoral researcher affiliated with Ghent University (Belgium), a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (Italy), and an adjunct professor of EU law at NYU Law School (USA). She is currently working on developing a model of relational human rights responsibility, to effectively apportion human rights responsibility stemming from hybrid forms of cooperation involving state actors and non-state actors such as international organisations and private entities, in addition to conducting research on planetary justice.

Joyce De Coninck holds a Master of Laws from Ghent University (2013, Magna Cum Laude) and an LLM in International and European Law from the Institute for European Studies – Free University of Brussels (2015, Summa Cum Laude). She obtained her doctoral degree at Ghent University (2021) titled “Catch-22 in the Law of Responsibility of International Organizations – Systemic Deficiencies in the EU Responsibility Paradigm for Unlawful Human Rights Conduct in Integrated Border Management”. Joyce was subsequently selected as an Emile Noël Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center of New York University (2021-2022), and a Scholar in Residence at NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (2022 – 2024). During her time at NYU, Joyce was appointed as an adjunct professor of law, following which she obtained a three-year FWO grant as an affiliated researcher. She has taught in various capacities at different universities including the College of Europe (BE), Minnesota Law School (USA), University of Amsterdam (NL) and Leiden University (NL).