Financialised migration control: Bureaucratisation and irresponsibility for refoulement and border violence

The financialisation of migration control has contributed to the bureaucraticisation—and thus irresponsibilisation—of EU migration control policies, both at the EU’s external borders, e.g. Greece, and at its externalised borders, e.g. in Libya and the central Mediterranean. The legal struggles we have undertaken with others to challenge these cooperative frameworks for the mass and structural violence against migrants that they enable and perpetuate date back to 2019, seeking much-needed transparency and public accountability for their harmful impacts.

These include two sets of interventions. The first set of legal interventions, submitted in April 2020, challenges financialised migration cooperation with Italian and Libyan authorities on grounds of financial mismanagement and maladministration, before the European Court of Auditors and the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee respectively, for enabling a host of abuses against migrants making their way to Europe, including their return to and containment in Libya. The second set of interventions, launched in July 2023 with the European Ombudsman, seeks redress for the harmful impacts of the EU’s funding and support for border control operations by Greece as an EU external border Member State.

Despite legislative and institutional reforms over the past years, the Commission has remained unable and unwilling to ensure proper fundamental rights monitoring and continues to wrongly rely on both Member States and third parties to enforce its border regime.