Presenters:
Sarah GANTY (JSD candidate, Yale Law School, New Haven; FWO Post-doctoral Fellow, Ghent University; Research Affiliate, CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest)

Dimitry V. KOCHENOV (Head of the Rule of Law Research Group and Founder of the Rule of Law Clinic, CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest; Professor of Legal Studies at CEU Department of Legal Studies, Vienna; Visiting Professor of EU Law, LUISS Guido Carli, Rome)

Participants:
Marius BALAN, Alexandra Alina IANCU, Bogdan IANCU, Cristian IONESCU, Mariana Mota PRADO, Maja SAHADŽIĆ, Attila VINCZE

Abstract:

The European Union (EU) deploys a handful of legal techniques to make sure that the whole spectrum of denying racialized non-citizens rights – from dignity to the right to life – is virtually never presented as a violation of EU law (even as the death-toll turns the Mediterranean Sea into a mass grave). Making this possible is the work of what we term ‘EU lawlessness law’: a careful summoning of diverse legal tools to make basic accountability and the protection of rights of the racialized passport poor impossible through creating an impunity shield against the application of international, national, EU and ECHR rights, values, and principles in a principled breach of the spirit – but not the letter – of EU law.

We detail the evolution of this system from early ‘soft law’ of impunity and rightlessness empowering Libyan militias to commit crimes on EU’s instruction to the EU-Turkey deal de facto greenlighted by the Court of Justice and the latest EU-Tunisia deal normalizing abuse. EU lawlessness law is part of the larger ‘Eurowhiteness’ project. We aim to start bridging the gap between, on the one hand, the day-to-day reality of outright exclusion of non-citizens from dignity and the law, the EU’s billions invested alongside countless other incessant efforts to promote lawlessness and a lack of any accountability in targeting the racialized passport poor – with the numerous proclamations about the Union’s equitable value-laden nature, on the other hand.

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This event is organized within the research project Rule of Law at the European Periphery: (Dis)incentive Structures and Conceptual Shifts (ROLPERIPHERAL) supported by UEFISCDI – Exploratory Research (PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-0319) and hosted by New Europe College.