How do governments navigate the tension between border security and the liberal principles of the rule of law and human rights? To answer this question, the project zooms in on the actors executing the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force: police forces responsible for controlling cross-border traffic at the border lines. Deploying more border guards is a way for governments to demonstrate responsiveness to voters demanding assertive controls. Yet, in a democracy, governments face liberal constraints in the way they can deploy police forces – from parliament, courts, the law, human rights treaties and other international agreements. Liberal constraints in border management have received relatively less scholarly attention compared to public preferences over migration. We don’t know to which extent liberal constraints have varied over time and across countries or how they influence how border agents do their job.
This project sets out to collect information on the extent to which national border authorities in Europe are subject to oversight by governments, parliaments, courts, and independent ombudsman offices. The more diverse and independent institutions are checking on the border agents’ work, the more constrained governments should be in the way they deploy them. This kind of “liberal-embedded” border management with checks and balances would provide officials, civil servants, and affected individuals with the opportunity to systematically document and report violations, impose disciplinary sanctions or pursue legal action, and thereby shape agency culture. The project then examines the conditions under which such accountability mechanisms for border agents are introduced or reformed, for example as a result of public pressure, reporting on violations, or in anticipation of accession to the European Union.
Since states are increasingly cooperating with one another in the area of border protection and, in doing so, are also outsourcing border protection tasks to non-democratic states, the project analyses how such cooperation affects the ability to hold officials accountable for violations. Cooperation might allow to evade liberal constraints by “outsourcing” patrol to weaker constraint countries. Or it might serve to bolster such constraints by diffusing good practices in accountability. Finally, the project addresses the question of how accountability mechanisms influence the frequency and severity of human rights violations at the border. Direct political control of agencies might hand down pressure to guard the border more assertively. In contrast, independent accountability mechanisms are more likely to enforce responsibility to human rights and the rule of law. In the project, we will leverage reforms in accountability to assess the causal effect on the reported and prosecuted behavior of agents.
- The project makes a contribution to the study of border politics by moving beyond anti-immigrant sentiment among the population to studying the resilience of liberal institutions to shifting popular demands. This will also further enrich the research on the relationship between domestic (il)liberalism and challenges to the liberal international order.
DE: Die menschenrechtlichen Beschwerdemechanismen der Vereinten Nationen ermöglichen Menschen auf der ganzen Welt, ihre nationalen Regierungen für Menschenrechtsverletzungen anzuklagen. Dieses Forschungsprojekt hat systematisch untersucht, welche Faktoren beeinflussen, ob Opfer von Menschenrechtsverletzungen Individualbeschwerden bei den Vereinten Nationen einreichen und welche Effekte diese Beschwerden auf die Menschenrechtssituationen in ihren Ländern haben. Die Forschungsergebnisse zeigen, dass Opfer von Menschenrechtsverletzungen mit niedrigerem sozioökonomischem Status häufig keine Beschwerden einreichen, weil sie die Mechanismen nicht kennen oder weil ihnen die notwendigen Sprachkenntnisse fehlen. Sozioökonomische Eliten sind systematisch überrepräsentiert in den Menschenrechtsbeschwerden an die Vereinten Nationen. Ausserdem zeigen die Forschungsergebnisse, dass diese Beschwerdemechanismen zur Verbesserung der Menschenrechtslage beitragen können, dass es aber in vielen Staaten auch repressive Vergeltung gegen zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen gibt, die Beschwerden gegen ihre Regierung einreichen. Die Forschungsergebnisse legen nahe, dass Beschwerdeführer von den Vereinten Nationen besser geschützt und anonym gehalten werden müssen, um sie vor repressiver Vergeltung zu schützen.
EN: The United Nations’ human rights complaints mechanism enables people from across the world to submit complaints against their national governments. This research project systematically examined which factors influence whether victims of human rights violations submit a complaint to the UN, and what effects such complaints have on the human rights situation in their countries.
The findings show that victims of human rights violations with lower socioeconomic status often do not file complaints because they are unaware of the mechanism or lack the required language skills. Socioeconomic elites are systematically overrepresented in human rights complaints submitted to the UN.
Although the findings show that the complaints mechanisms can lead to improvements in human rights, in many states there is also repressive retaliation against civil society organisations that file complaints against their governments. The findings further suggest that complainants must be better protected by the UN and kept anonymous in order to protect them from retaliatory repression.