[Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen is Research Director at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and author of Access to Asylum: International refugee law and the globalisation of migration control (CUP, 2011), which won the Idman Award for best monograph in public international law.]
In 1992 President George HW Bush ordered the United States Coast Guard to stop all persons fleeing Haiti in international waters. When a majority of the United States Supreme Court upheld the legality of this interdiction program, it paved the way for more than 65,000 people being returned to Haiti with no assessment of any claims for political asylum. Beyond this, the
Sale case could be argued to have two legacies – one political and one legal. US policy and
Sale undoubtedly inspired many other countries to adopt similar interdiction schemes and perhaps a more general trend to speculate in circumventing obligations under international refugee law. Yet,
Sale also prompted other courts and refugee advocates to pick up the torch, ensuring that international refugee law has developed dynamically in response to new patterns of migration control.
High seas interdiction forms parts of a wider set of deterrence measures to administratively or physically prevent refugees from accessing asylum. From visa controls to biometric scans, migration control is no longer something performed only at the perimeter of a state’s sovereign territory, but rather forms a set of progressive mechanisms to check travellers at every step of their prospective journey. A common trait of many of these policies is that they are designed to carve out exceptions to, circumvent or shift obligations otherwise owed under international law, often through governance measures that could hardly have been foreseen when the 1951 Refugee Convention was drafted. The US interdiction program in the 1990s constitutes a prime example. By geographically shifting migration control to block Haitian refugees on the high seas, it was argued that neither US nor international law applied.
The majority of the Supreme Court in
Sale not only upheld the government’s claim, it set off a proliferation of extraterritorial migration control practices. High sea interdiction programmes have since been introduced both in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Migration control has further become a foreign policy issue, with bilateral and multilateral agreements paving the way for migration control within the territorial waters, airports or border zones of origin or transit states, or the enlisting of third country authorities to perform exit or entry control on behalf of sponsoring states. In parallel, responsibility for migration control has been delegated to corporate actors. From the initial imposition of carrier sanctions spreading through the 1980s, private security companies and other contractors are today increasingly taking on immigration controls both at the border and overseas. These practices all raise complex questions about the reach of international refugee and human rights obligations, attribution of conduct and the division of responsibility for human rights violations.
