Ces Cahiers sont rédigés par l'EDEM, l’équipe Droits européens et migrations, constituée à l’UCL au sein du CeDIE. Ils se proposent de présenter quelques arrêts récents d’une juridiction nationale ou européenne dans ses domaines d'études, à savoir la mise en œuvre du droit européen de l’asile et de l’immigration en droit belge.

These Commentaries are written by the European Rights and Migration team (EDEM), which is part of the UCL. Each month, they present recent judgments from national or European courts in the field of the implementation of European asylum and immigration law in Belgian law. The Commentaries are written in French and/or English.

Editorial : Between Borders and Territories: Law or Migration

In the context of the international conference Time of Territories, held on the occasion of the 10 years of the research team, the EDEM organised a call for papers addressed mainly to PhD students. Having received a great number of proposals, we were able to organize two Young Researchers' Workshops. The workshop format resulted in rich exchanges among peers and senior academics on the broad topic of Law and Migration. For many of the researchers we hosted in Louvain-la-Neuve, this was the first chance to meet in person. We have now invited the Workshop participants to contribute to two consecutive Special Issues of the Cahiers de l’EDEM. In thanking all the contributors, we hope that it was an opportunity to nourish their research projects and further develop their own’s research skills. We also thank the members of EDEM who supported us during the Workshops and during the coordination of the Special Issues.

While the first Special Issue was dedicated to the topic of vulnerability, this second Special Issue focuses on the notion of border. Understood in its legal, geographical and philosophical dimensions, the border can define who is in and who is out of the European Union territory, implementing dynamics of inclusions and exclusion from access to certain rights. Pushbacks, hot returns, fiction of non-entry, a-territoriality, transit areas are some of the concepts discussed in this Issue.

The first contribution explores the interrelationship between poor accountability for human rights violations at the borders and the inadequacy of national systems in ensuring human rights enforcement while presenting a critical reading of the European Commission's proposal under the Screening Regulation (Gabriel Almeida). Most of the contributions look at Member States' practices as an illustration of controversial border regimes – and in particular pushbacks – starting with the bottom-up influence of Spain on the ECtHR in the creation of an exception to Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 ECHR in the context of land pushbacks at the Moroccan-Spanish border (Clara Bosch March). A legal ethnographic analysis of the consequences of the reintroduction of border controls at the internal borders between Italy and France follows and discusses the “ambiguous territorial space near the borderline and exclusionary bordering processes” (Bastien Charaudeau Santomauro). The case of internal border controls in France is further explored in its relationship with the role of discretion in the decisions of the French administrative authorities (Claire Bories). Another contribution focuses on how the legal fiction of non-entry is implemented in a number of domestic legal frameworks as well as in EU law while examining how the New Pact on Migration and Asylum institutionalises the fiction of non-entry at the EU external borders (Francesca Rondine). Finally, the issue of pushbacks at the border is presented in its less known "digital" aspect through the practice of asylum refusal decisions and entry and residence bans between States Members of the Schengen area through the Schengen Information System (Romain Lanneau).

Underlying that the contributions hosted in this Special Issue are part of ongoing research projects, we hope that they will foster further exchanges and contacts among researchers. Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

On behalf of the EDEM,

Zoé Crine, Eleonora Frasca and Francesca Raimondo