Abstract
We argue that ‘civic disobedience’ by civil society actors starts only after governments begin to disobey international human rights and humanitarian law. In the name of migration management, governments at the EU (European Union) external borders started to conduct illegal pushbacks and pay third countries to conduct pullbacks to prevent the spontaneous arrivals of refugees and other migrants.
The ‘social disobedience’ theory proposes that when acting in resistance to such laws, civil society actors are attempting to construct an ‘alternative reality’. We argue that such emphasis is misplaced. In fact, it is not they but governments who are constructing an alternative hierarchy of norms in the international legal order.
We conclude that while the ‘social disobedience’ concept gives some legitimacy to those who help migrants, it implies that they are ‘guilty without a crime’. Thus, we propose instead to speak about ‘state disobedience’ to international human rights and humanitarian law and other customary law principles, which should have guided lawmakers in the first place.
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Vosyliūtė, L., Brenda Smialowski, S. (2023). Guilty Without Crime: The Policing of Solidarity with Refugees and Other Migrants. In: Daher, L.M. (eds) Democratic Protests and New Forms of Collective Action. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44049-6_11
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