Playing by the Rules: Ceuta, Coercive Migration, and the Solidarity That Never Came

[José Enrique Conde Belmonte is a Professor of Public International Law and European Union Law at the Complutense University of Madrid. He writes here in a personal academic capacity.]

On 30 July 2026, roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta — population 84,000 — in under forty-eight hours, most of them by sea around the Tarajal breakwater. At least 67 people died. Within days, more than 50,000 had gone back to Morocco — the majority voluntarily, the rest under a repatriation arrangement announced jointly by Madrid and Rabat. And within those same days, Italy announced the temporary suspension of Schengen arrangements with Spain, several capitals demanded Spain’s exclusion from the free-movement area, and twenty-two European leaders signed a letter blaming Spanish policy for the crisis while calling for a European response to the “instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats.” Hold on to that phrase. It will matter later.

I write from Spain, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise. But the argument of this post is not that Spain is right because it is Spain: being champions of the world — which, as of 19 July, we happen to be — is an excellent argument on a football pitch and no argument at all in international law. The claim is rather that the legal order engaged at Ceuta is indivisible: the same body of rules that protects Spanish territorial integrity against coercion also protects the people who swam into Ceuta against being treated as instruments — and obliges the European Union to share a burden it has preferred to export. Three actors are being tested at once. None gets to invoke the law only when convenient.

First, the Uncomfortable Part

Let me begin with what does not help. Mass returns on this scale sit uneasily with the prohibition of collective expulsion under Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights, and any honest account written from the Spanish side has to say so before saying anything else — particularly when the Spanish Supreme Court had held, barely three weeks earlier, that Spanish law does not permit the summary return of those intercepted at sea — a judgment whose distorted online readings helped trigger the crossings. The gap between 60,000 arrivals and any conceivable individualized examination is not a technicality. It is the first thing every critical reader will notice.

There are, however, three answers available to Spain, and they are stronger than the headline suggests. The first is doctrinal. In N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held that applicants who take advantage of a mass, unauthorized crossing — using the force of numbers rather than existing legal avenues of entry — place themselves in an unlawful situation attributable to their own conduct, and cannot then invoke the protection against collective expulsion. Whatever one thinks of that judgment (and much of the academy thinks little of it), it is the law of the Convention, and the facts of July 2026 fit its logic more squarely than the 2014 fence-storming that produced it.

The second answer is that a large share of what looks like expulsion was not expulsion at all. Most of those who returned did so voluntarily, within days, once the promises circulated online proved false — and a voluntary return engages neither Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 nor Spanish removal procedures. The remainder were processed under bilateral instruments: the 1992 Spain–Morocco readmission agreement for third-country nationals, and the ad hoc arrangement of 30 July for Moroccan nationals. A treaty basis does not, by itself, discharge Convention obligations — but it distinguishes these returns from the informal push-backs the Strasbourg case law was built to condemn.

The third answer is material. No asylum system on earth can individually process 60,000 arrivals in a city of 84,000 within days. This is not a formal plea of necessity under Article 25 of the ILC Articles, whose cumulative requirements Spain would struggle to satisfy. It is something more modest and more honest: the obligations of the receiving state cannot be assessed in a vacuum, as if the scale of the event and the conduct of others were irrelevant context.

And there are limits that must be conceded rather than argued away. The own-conduct doctrine does not cover everyone who entered: unaccompanied minors, persons with manifest protection needs, and those for whom the supposed legal avenues were not genuinely accessible remain entitled to individualized guarantees — beginning with non-refoulement under Article 3, from which the own-conduct doctrine offers no exit — and Spain will have to answer for those cases one by one. That concession is the difference between a legal argument and a nationalist one.

Ceuta Is Not a Colony

The second front is older and, legally, far simpler. Ceuta has been Spanish since 1580, Melilla since 1497 — centuries before the modern Moroccan state achieved independence in 1956. Neither territory has ever been included in the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories maintained by the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. The contrast that matters here is Western Sahara: Spain accepts — as it must — that Western Sahara remains on that list and that its status is governed by the law of decolonization. That acceptance is precisely what disposes of the tu quoque. Spain’s position is not selective; it tracks the UN framework in both directions, where it favours Spain and where it does not.

It should also be said, with regret, that the erosion of that framework has not been Morocco’s work alone. When recognition of sovereignty over a Non-Self-Governing Territory is traded as diplomatic currency — as Washington chose to do in 2020 and Jerusalem in 2023 — the lesson taught to every revisionist actor in the system is that leverage and persistence outlast the law. States that expect the rules-based order to protect their interests elsewhere might reflect on what they license by suspending it where inconvenient. Part of what arrived at Ceuta’s breakwater in July is the bill for that lesson.

The occasional extension of irredentist rhetoric to the Canary Islands is useful mainly as a reductio: it shows where the logic of “geographic proximity equals colonial title” leads, which is nowhere international law has ever been willing to go.

There is, finally, a human fact that the vocabulary of decolonization cannot digest. The population of Ceuta — Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu communities that have coexisted there for generations — manifestly identifies as Spanish, and says so at every electoral and civic opportunity. The comparison with Gibraltar and the Falklands is instructive, and I make it advisedly, well aware of Spain’s own position on the former: in a genuine decolonization dispute, the legal weight of the inhabitants’ wishes is contested terrain. But Ceuta is not a decolonization dispute, which is what makes the point work a fortiori. There is no colonized people here awaiting emancipation from an administering power — only Spanish citizens whom a neighbouring state proposes to absorb against their unmistakable will, an outcome that no reading of self-determination, however generous to the claimant, can be made to support.

None of this requires hostility to self-determination. One can take the principle as seriously as it deserves — and I do — and still insist on the obvious: such claims are pursued through negotiation, the International Court of Justice, and the political organs of the United Nations, not by engineering pressure at a border fence. Playing by the rules is what distinguishes a legal claim from a revisionist project.

Civilians as Instruments: The Hybrid Question

Here precision matters more than anywhere else — twice over. The people who swam into Ceuta are not weapons, and describing them as such repeats, rhetorically, the very wrong at issue. And attribution in 2026 is genuinely harder than in 2021, when the European Parliament formally condemned Morocco’s easing of border controls and its use of unaccompanied minors as a means of political pressure on a Member State. This time, both Rabat and Madrid blame smuggling networks and online disinformation, and Morocco’s ambassador publicly asked for her fellow citizens’ return. An honest analysis starts from that record, not from the assumption that 2021 simply repeated itself.

But an honest analysis does not end there either. States control their exit borders; 60,000 people do not reach a frontier of this sensitivity without at minimum a failure of the due diligence Morocco owes its neighbour — the obligation, familiar since Corfu Channel, not to allow one’s territory to be used knowingly for acts contrary to the rights of other states. The pattern gives pause: 2021 coincided with a bilateral dispute over Western Sahara; 2026 with Spain’s diplomatic opening to Algeria, Rabat’s regional rival. Coincidence is not attribution — but it is a reason to ask questions, and what coercive engineered migration scholarship calls a familiar script.

This is where the vocabulary of hybrid warfare enters — and where a lawyer must handle it with care. “Hybrid threat” is not a term of art in international law; its operative content remains the old one: the principle of non-intervention affirmed in Nicaragua, the duty of due diligence, the prohibition of coercion. But the vocabulary matters politically and, increasingly, normatively. When Belarus engineered crossings at the Polish, Lithuanian and Finnish borders, the EU institutions did not hesitate to call it a hybrid attack — and responded by legislating: the instrumentalisation of migrants is now a defined legal category in Regulation (EU) 2024/1359, with its own derogation regime for the Member State under pressure. The twenty-two leaders’ letter on Ceuta itself invokes “instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats.” Europe has already named the phenomenon. What it has not done is draw the consequence: a state facing a hybrid campaign at the Union’s external border is that campaign’s victim — and the Union’s own legal framework is built on that premise.

The Solidarity That Never Came

Which brings me to the actor whose failure has attracted the least legal attention. Article 80 TFEU provides that the Union’s border, asylum and immigration policies are governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications. That is a constitutional principle of primary law, not an aspiration, and Regulation (EU) 2024/1351 finally gave it operational teeth through a mandatory solidarity mechanism designed for precisely this scenario. The Union has also spent years channelling hundreds of millions of euros to Morocco in migration-management funding — financing, in effect, the border apparatus whose failure or forbearance made July possible.

Measure the actual European response against that standard. Italy suspended Schengen arrangements with Spain; Denmark, Finland, Austria and others treated exclusion as a legitimate instrument; twenty-two leaders blamed Spanish regularization as a pull factor while the Spanish Prime Minister was reduced to requesting an emergency Justice and Home Affairs Council to remind his partners of their obligations. The front was not uniform — Germany and Belgium expressly rejected the logic of exclusion — but the dominant reflex was not burden-sharing. It was burden-exporting: the conversion of a common external border into a purely Spanish problem, to be managed flawlessly and alone.

A possible objection runs that solidarity must be earned through border control, and that supporting Spain would reward lax policy. The objection inverts the system’s logic — and collides with Europe’s own chosen vocabulary. One cannot describe Ceuta as “instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats”, as the twenty-two leaders’ letter does, and simultaneously treat the targeted state as the wrongdoer. On that characterization — the letter’s, not mine — the campaign is an attack on the Union through one of its members, and its authorship is legally beside the point: under Regulation (EU) 2024/1359, instrumentalisation may be the work of a third country or of hostile non-state actors, including the smuggling networks both governments blame. Either way, the coherent responses are those the Union itself legislated — solidarity, relocation, resources — not the victim’s expulsion from the free-movement area. A Member State cannot be simultaneously Europe’s shield and Europe’s scapegoat. An order that demands individualized guarantees from Spain while withholding the instruments its own primary law makes the system’s precondition is demanding compliance with one hand and disabling it with the other.

Conclusion

The rules engaged at Ceuta form a single fabric. They tell Morocco that territorial claims are argued before courts, and that due diligence at its border — preventing its territory from being used, by whomever, to engineer pressure on a neighbour — is not a favour to be granted or withheld. They tell Spain that sovereignty, even under this kind of pressure, does not suspend the guarantees owed to those who cannot be brought within the own-conduct doctrine. And they tell the European Union that if it means what its own leaders’ letter says about hybrid threats, solidarity is a legal obligation that falls due precisely when it is expensive. Ceuta in July 2026 is not a bilateral incident. It is a stress test of whether anyone at Europe’s southern frontier — claimant, guardian, or Union — is still willing to play by the rules. Spain should hold itself to that standard. It is entitled to demand that everyone else do the same.

Photo attribution: “Coast of Ceuta, Spain” by Diego Delso is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.