Immigration Article of the Day: Third-Country Deportations: Legal and Ethical Problems by Andrew Hall

Third-Country Deportations: Legal and Ethical Problems by Andrew Hall

 Abstract

The UN Refugee Convention and Protocol, as well as the UN Convention Against Torture, impose upon states a duty to prevent refoulement. Yet, migrant destination states increasingly attempt to triangulate and circumvent this obligation by removing asylum seekers to third countries to which they have no prior connection. Third-country deportation—often with no due process—has been a favorite tactic of the second Trump Administration in particular, in contravention of longstanding legal precedents. This paper explores some of the unique legal and ethical problems which arise in cases of third-country deportation, including disruption of migrants’ reasonable expectations; ignoring the historical responsibilities that arise out of particular bilateral or dyadic migration systems; what Allison Wolf calls “derivatization” of migrants in which cruelty is styled as deterrence; and, most troublingly, the specter of triangular refoulement (a risk which already has in fact been realized in numerous Trump-era third-country deportations). To the extent that a third-country deportation regime theoretically could be constructed without falling afoul of international and domestic law, it is clear no such regime has yet emerged in practice.