Externalisation of Migration Control: Impunity or Accountability for Human Rights Violations?

Externalisation and the human rights violations it entails have received much attention in recent years from both advocates and academics. Since a key aspect of externalisation consists in people on the move staying in the Global South, the locus of litigation has broadened from externalising states in the Global North to also include accountability mechanisms in the Global South. Therefore, this article seeks to answer the following question: to what extent do the international and regional human rights regimes provide accountability mechanisms for violations of the human rights of people on the move in the context of externalisation? It does so through a comparison of externalisation policies in three different regions: the Mediterranean, North America and the Pacific. In each region, the analysis focuses on cooperation between an externalising state in the Global North and a neighbouring state in the Global South to illustrate the differences and similarities between the various contexts: Australia and Indonesia, the United States and Mexico, and Italy and Libya. For each context, the analysis examines the policies implemented by externalising states and their effect on the human rights of people on the move as well as states’ substantive and procedural human rights commitments under the applicable international and regional human rights regimes. While there is no ‘one size fits all’, it shows that there are only limited accountability mechanisms available to people on the move affected by the externalisation of migration control.