Missing migrants: legal obligations and psychosocial implications for families.

Abstract

This thesis is an analysis of the responses and obligations of states towards missing migrants and their surviving families from a legal, policy and psychosocial perspective in the context of the Europe migrant crisis. Governed by the UK migration policies in relation to missing migrants and employing multi-theoretical premises drawn from the jurisprudence of the New Haven School of International Law and the works of Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and Pauline Boss, five principal lines of inquiry are pursued in the study: (a) what the appropriate legal and policy responses of states to missing migrants should be; (b) why migrants die and go missing in migration; (c) what obligations states have towards missing migrants and their families; (d) how transnationally effective the UK migration policies in relation to missing migrants are; and (e) how psychosocially responsible the UK migration policies in relation to missing migrants are. Utilising a combination of two methodologies—the New Haven School Jurisprudence and Thematic Analysis of Secondary Narrative Interviews, the study finds inter alia that the legal and policy responses of states to missing migrants are inadequate and not effective enough such as to achieve the international community’s goal of securing a safe, orderly and regular migration world based on human dignity. The study also finds that existing EU and UK migration policy frameworks were not specifically designed with missing migrants and needs of their families in mind. The study’s main contribution rests on three central arguments. Firstly, states play a crucially dominant role in the dialectic relationship between them and migrants and their families and as such, they have the primary responsibility to account for missing migrants and respect the rights and needs of their families. Secondly, since states play the most dominant role, they are under a higher order obligation under international law to protect, fulfil and respect migrants’ values of human dignity and right to have rights. Thirdly, states can demonstrate that they accept their obligations to missing migrants, and are politically willing to implement them, by making their national migration policies more transnationally effective and psychosocially responsible. In developing these arguments, the study makes original and significant contributions to knowledge in a number of ways. Firstly, the study contributes to existing knowledge by considering what the legal and policy responses of states to missing migrants have been at the international, regional and national levels, and what normative claims for the legitimacy of current and future decision trends would be required. Secondly, this study contributes to literature by including theory grounded evidence to explain the phenomenon of migrant deaths at sea and borders and the failure of state responsibility towards migrants. Thirdly, the study makes practical contribution to knowledge by drawing up a responsibility based argument that theorises how responsibility may be allocated to multiple states in practice. Fourthly, this study bridges a UK specific knowledge gap as to the transnational effectiveness and psychosocial responsibleness of the UK national migration policies in relation to missing migrants.