Our congratulations to Katharine Woolrych who has completed an LLM in Human Rights Law and was awarded the 2021 John MacGregor Prize.
Katharine shares with us some thoughts on her dissertation.
In recent times, the EU has increasingly relied on measures implemented beyond member state territory to control and suppress migration to the bloc. One such measure is the EU’s financial, material and operational support for the Libyan coast guard in intercepting migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
As of October 2021, some 87,000 people had been returned to Libya following interception at sea since 2016. There, they are arbitrarily and indefinitely detained, and often made to suffer torture, ill-treatment, sexual violence, trafficking, killings, extortion or forced labour.
My thesis explores the responsibility of the EU for these human rights violations, with a particular focus on torture, refoulement, and violations of the right to leave any country.
International human rights law and the law of international responsibility comprise complementary frameworks that may be used to establish EU responsibility for cooperation with Libya. Nonetheless, practical, procedural, and political obstacles to accountability remain. These barriers expose the limitations of state-and-territory-based legal frameworks in dealing with international organisations and externalised migration control strategies.
Ambassador John Macgregor was Dean of the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies from 2007 to 2009. On his departure he established a prize which is to be awarded, by the Brussels Board of Examiners, to the student with the best taught postgraduate performance on any programme at the Brussels School of International Studies.