The institutional development of European Union (EU) agencies is striking. Over the past decades, forty-six EU agencies have been established to support the European Commission and member states in... Show moreThe institutional development of European Union (EU) agencies is striking. Over the past decades, forty-six EU agencies have been established to support the European Commission and member states in their regulatory and executive tasks. Today, EU agencies are a vital part of the EU’s administrative capacity. EU agencies have received considerable scholarly attention that used a myriad of theoretical approaches—ranging from institutional, organizational, and bureaucratic reputation to interest group theories—to explain why EU agencies have been created; how they develop over time; whether they are wielders of supranational or intergovernmental power; how they legitimize themselves and cultivate a positive bureaucratic reputation; and how they form alliances or insulate themselves from specific stakeholders. This chapter reviews the rise of EU agencies and introduces a selection of theoretical perspectives that have been used by EU agency scholars to study EU-level agencification and EU agency behaviour, regulatory processes, and outputs. Show less
Affluent states increasingly seek to control migration beyond their borders. One means of doing this has been to relegate migration administration to third states. To illustrate, Australia places... Show moreAffluent states increasingly seek to control migration beyond their borders. One means of doing this has been to relegate migration administration to third states. To illustrate, Australia places asylum seekers offshore, while the EU-Turkey agreement has served to limit the number of Syrian refugees able to access other parts of Europe. In addition, states have set up cooperative arrangements with transit states with problematic human rights records, such as Libya. These practices raise the question whether states remain responsible under human rights law for protecting migrants whose stakes are governed by the third countries with which they cooperate. The first part of this chapter describes the concepts of externalisation and outsourcing of migration control and provides illustrations from state practice. The second part analyses to which extent migration control beyond the border can trigger the applicability of human rights instruments. It is shown how the notion of ‘human rights jurisdiction’ may be further developed so as to accommodate for human rights checks on these emerging practices in the field of migration control. Show less
