Noble Cause at the Border? Unravelling crimmigration control in EU border areas

11h45 à 12h30
Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, local C-2059
Carrefour des arts et des sciences
3150, rue Jean-Brillant

Aucune réservation requise

Maartje van der Woude is Full Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Society (VVI) and Associate Professor of Criminal Law at the Institute for Criminal Law & Criminology. Her current research on border control and border communities in the EU, for which Professor Van der Woude was granted one of the competitive Vidi grants issued by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), takes an interdisciplinary approach by focusing both on the legal normative questions as well as the empirical questions. By studying the political discourse and legislation at the level of the EU as well as at Member State level, Van der Woude aims to provide insight into the interaction and complex dynamics between the level of supranational decision-making and the level of national decision-making.

Summary:

Ever since the implementation of the Schengen agreement in 1985, driven by concerns about mass migration and transnational crime, Member states have sought ways to monitor internal migration mobility without breaching the Schengen Border Code. In the Netherlands the vital role of monitoring the internal border areas is fulfilled by the Military and Border Police (MBP). Their official task is to prevent irregular migration, yet, as a result of increased concerns over the EU’s external borders and the global war on terror, this official focus of immigration control seems to have been extended to unofficially also include crime control. Whereas this development of "crimmigration control" in border areas can partially be explained by developments on the EU and national policy level, it is also necessary to look at the role of human agency and the often highly discretionary decisions made by individual border patrol officers. To what extent do their actions (further) fuel this process of crimmigration control? Can their behaviour be explained by what in the literature on police ethics has been coined as "noble cause" decision-making - decision-making that favours utilitarian ends in law enforcement activity - or are there other less noble underlying rationales?

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