How one leaky rubber boat could sink the EU's entire migration policy
Dr Violeta Moreno Lax comments on on Italy’s deal with Libya regarding migrant ‘pull-backs’ for The Correspondent
At the end of 2017, a dinghy with 150 African migrants on board sank into the Mediterranean Sea. Some of them drowned, some were taken to Italy, and a number disappeared into a Libyan detention centre, where they endured beatings, extortion, starvation and rape. Seventeen survivors filed a lawsuit - and the court case could capsize the entire EU migration policy. Dr Violeta Moreno-Lax from Queen Mary University of London was the lead counsel on this case. Dr Moreno-Lax said: "The Italian authorities are outsourcing to Libya what they prohibited from undertaking themselves, doing indirectly what they cannot do directly. They are pulling back migrants and exposing them to extreme forms of treatment by proxy, through the so-called Libyan Coast Guard."
Read the full article on The Correspondent.
More information:
- Dr Moreno-Lax is Reader in Law at the School of Law at Queen Mary. She is founder and former Co-Director of the Centre for European and Internatonal Legal Affairs (CEILA)
- She is also the founder of the School of Law's Immigration Law LLM
