MOBILE/CEPRI – Open Lab with Sarah Ganty

EU Lawlessness Law: Europe’s Passport Apartheid from Indifference to Torture and Killing

Guest presenter: Dr. Sarah Ganty is a FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Human Rights Center of Ghent University and a research affiliate at the Democracy Institute in Budapest. She is also a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School where she is the President of the Yale Law School European Law Association. Sarah Ganty’s research focuses on immigration law, social justice, anti-discrimination law and citizenship law. She is currently working on the concept of merit as a proxy for how public, economic and social goods, offices and legal status ought to be shared or attributed.  With strong background in EU law, she is active in the study of the European Union legal system too. She taught social justice, EU law and human rights law at CEU (Vienna) as well as the ULB and the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis in Brussels.

Presentation: Senior researcher Sarah Ganty will take a close look at the most important legal techniques deployed by the European Union to make sure that the whole spectrum of denying non-citizens rights – from dignity to the right to life – is never presented as a violation of EU law even in the cases when dozens of thousands are hunted and detained by proxies while the Mediterranean has been turned by EU’s and Member States’ incessant efforts into a mass grave.

She will explain how the so called ‘EU lawlessness law’ operates, how the EU pays for it, how it passes legal scrutiny and what its objectives are. She will outline why it is a grave violation of EU values and why deploying legality to ensure that the most significant rights are turned into fiction is an affront to the Rule of Law. To present a complete picture of EU lawlessness law, she has delved into the treatment of non-Europeans both inside and outside the Union. The core principle is always there, and it is the principle of passport apartheid.

In the EU, there is usually no need to break the law to deny the foreigner crucial rights: apartheid européen works well from the internal market to the Belarusian forest and an EU-funded Libyan prison for the innocents, who committed no crime. Two examples to elaborate this starting point: the near complete exclusion of non-EU citizens from the fundamental freedoms in the EU from the inception of the Union; and the pro-active stance of the Union and the Member States in ensuring that the right to seek protection in the EU is turned into an unworkable proclamation. EU lawlessness law is always on the side of the Union and Ganty outlines a spectrum of injustice to showcase different instances of how EU’s legality enters into direct conflict with the Rule of Law to denigrate non-Europeans.

Money matters – and the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa emerged as a reliable and unaccountable purse for EU lawlessness law. Acting either directly, or by proxies in the fog of its lawlessness law, the EU can torture, kill, imprison, and enslave and it does so mostly targeting the racialised people from its former colonies.

FRONTEX, an EU agency, is at the forefront of stripping non-Europeans of rights. The atypical nature of the Union as an ideal type of passport apartheid with a complex legal structure imparting invisibility on non-citizens, while deluding responsibility and boasting no effective accountability structures for more than 25.000 drowned and 100.000 captured in the Mediterranean, has been served well by own lawlessness law. The passport apartheid core of the punishing EU legal system is significantly undertheorized, and this Open Lab will present a paper with aims to start bridging the gap between the day-to-day reality of outright exclusion of non-citizens from dignity and the law and EU’s billions invested alongside countless other incessant efforts to promote lawlessness on the one hand and the lack of accountability and the numerous proclamations about the Union's equitable value-laden nature on the other.

Moderator: Associate Professor Silvia Adamo, CEPRI

Time: 11 September 2023 13:00-14:15

Place: MOBILE – meeting room 6B-2-22 Southern Campus

Online participation

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