There has never been a more pertinent time to discuss the accountability and the legal responsibility of Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, for fundamental rights violations. In a... Show moreThere has never been a more pertinent time to discuss the accountability and the legal responsibility of Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, for fundamental rights violations. In a period that hosts the first legal actions vis-à-vis the agency and a series of relevant non-judicial investigations, including by the European Parliament, this dissertation aims to address the main problem underlying these accountability efforts, namely the ‘problem of many hands’. As conceptualised by Dennis Thompson, this problem is where the multiplicity of the actors involved obscures the various responsibilities and creates gaps in accountability.To address it, this work contests the dominant ways of looking at the concepts of responsibility and accountability, and reimagines them for their optimal function.It adopts a holistic approach, taking into account not only judicial, but also other forms of accountability, studying not only EU liability law, but also other legal remedies before the CJEU, the ECtHR, and domestic courts, building bridges between international and EU law, and traveling from the empirical to the conceptual, to the normative, and from there to the applied.It creates the foundations for the accountability of the agency inside and outside courts, within the EU borders and beyond. Show less
The book focuses on the legal implications of external mechanisms of migration control for the protection of refugees and irregular migrants. It defends the thesis that when European states... Show moreThe book focuses on the legal implications of external mechanisms of migration control for the protection of refugees and irregular migrants. It defends the thesis that when European states endeavor to control the movement of migrants outside their territories, they remain responsible under international law for upholding the rights of refugees and more general human rights. The book explores how refugee and human rights law responds to a phenomenon whereby states engage in external activity and seek cooperation with other actors in the context of migration control; how EU law governs and constrains the various types of pre-border migration enforcement employed by the Member States of the European Union; and examines the conformity with international law of current and unfolding practices of external migration control. Show less
