Evading Forced Migrants' Rights in the EU: Exploring Organizational Evasion through Frontex

Although the EU has a strong legal system to protect human and refugee rights, the "migrant crisis" has produced powerful domestic pressures to violate international refugee law and abrogate the rights of forced migrants. Competing pressures to uphold international refugee law and to violate it have led the EU to evasion. Evasion is a form of bad-faith compliance that describes compliance with the law but not with its purpose. In the case of migration in the EU, I argue that the EU engages in a unique process of evasion that I label as organizational evasion, creating Frontex – an independent agency – to take advantage of structural challenges in pursuing accountability to abrogate the rights of forced migrants. I describe how Frontex's structure is designed to amplify these accountability gaps and power inequalities, and I explore three strategies – rhetorical deconstitution and reframing, migrant pushbacks, and safe third countries – Frontex engages in to evade.