When: Tuesday, June 28, 2022, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PMWhere: Online / Room 2.10, School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
This event is organised by (B)OrderS: Centre for the Legal Study of Borders and Migration and marks the end of this academic year’s calendar of events.
Professor Valsamis Mitsilegas will discuss the proliferation of extraterritorial immigration control, which has been increasingly accompanied by the extension of the EU preventive agenda to the EU external border. The lecture will evaluate critically the current transformation of the EU external border into a site of preventive injustice, by examining the shift from the prevention of migrant access to the territory to the prevention of access to law. The lecture will put forward a multi-level taxonomy of preventive injustice in this context, examining the uses and abuses of pushbacks, non-entry, instrumentalization and detention policies in EU Member States and recent EU law proposals (including the Pact on Migration and Asylum) and highlighting the challenges this preventive paradigm poses to the European rule of law.
The event will be chaired by Professor Violeta Moreno-Lax (Founding Director of (B)OrderS: Centre for the Legal Study of Borders and Migration).
Professor Valsamis Mitsilegas is Professor of European Criminal Law and Global Security, Director of the Criminal Justice Centre, and Deputy Dean for Global Engagement (Europe) at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests and expertise lie in the fields of European criminal law; migration, asylum and borders; security and human rights, including the impact of mass surveillance on privacy; and legal responses to transnational crime, including organised crime and money laundering. From 2001 to 2005 he served as legal adviser to the House of Lords European Union Committee. He is a regular adviser to think-tanks, parliaments, governments and EU institutions including the European Commission, the European Parliament and the EU Fundamental Rights Agency and is currently serving for a second term as a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Criminal Policy. He is the author of seven monographs and over 150 articles and chapters in academic volumes. His books include EU Criminal Law (2nd Edition, Hart Publishing, 2022), EU Criminal Law after Lisbon (Hart Publishing, 2016) and The Criminalisation of Migration in Europe (Springer 2015).
Founded in 2022, the (B)Orders Centre focuses on the study of bordering, ordering and othering processes through law. It constitutes an excellence hub for intellectual collaboration and evaluation of the role of law in the making and unmaking of borders and their impact on global (im)mobility. It connects scholars within and beyond Queen Mary Law School to harness existing inter- and multi-disciplinary research into law, borders and (im)mobility and shape future research and policy agendas in response to global challenges.