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The European Union since the 1990s has been engaged in a unique project of reducing mobility controls between members while strengthening the external borders and then shifting control outward. The individual pieces of the remote control strategies themselves are common, with the exception of the Frontex external border control coordinating agency, which does not have parallels in the North American or Australian cases. Europeanization has cross-cutting effects on remote control. The ubiquity of policies rooted in law, regulations, or formal agreements with other states—around readmission, visas, carrier sanctions, safe third countries, and safe countries of origin—is a result of Europeanization. However, Europeanization also includes built-in constraints derived from its supranational courts and institutions.

Member States started adopting carrier liability regulations from the mid-1980s, seemingly as a direct response to increasing numbers of asylum requests, with immigration liaison officer (ILO) schemes proliferating afterwards. Techniques of ‘remote control’ have now been communautarised, providing an additional layer of control. Both carriers and ILOs have privileged access to migrants bound to the EU already at the pre-entry phase. Making them responsible for the anticipated enforcement of visas has the potential to block lines of regular (and safe) access to those in need of international protection. This chapter is concerned with these developments. It analyses carrier sanctions and ILOs legislation, comparing the EU regime with its international counterparts. The review encompasses the pre- and post-Schengen periods as well as recent innovations concerning the automated treatment and transfer of advance passenger information (API) and the creation of ‘Frontex liaison officers’. The impact of carrier sanctions and ILO activities on refugee flows is scrutinized at the end, pointing at a structural incompatibility of advance border enforcement, through a model of ‘imperfect delegation’/’hidden coercion’, with basic guarantees against denial of entry.

The aerial dome is the single most effective block in the architecture of remote control. The contemporary dome over U.S., Canadian, and Mexican airspace was derived from controls over transoceanic shipping passengers dating back to the nineteenth century. Its deeply rooted history makes the system seem natural. The use and framing of mobility controls as a way to protect national security also has a history more than a century old. Terrorist attacks further generated a strong security rationale for strict passenger controls that states then use to keep out all manner of unwanted foreigners. Many controls are exercised in spaces that are difficult for watchdogs to access. The people harmed by the system because they are blocked from reaching sanctuary are uncounted and unseen. As a result of these characteristics, there are few institutional constraints on the system of visas, carrier sanctions, liaison officers, pre-clearance operations, and international anti-smuggling operations that together constitute the dome.

This chapter explores issues of access to protection. Refugee protection depends, in practice, on access to a place of refuge. Border controls have been extended and intensified, so that safe access to asylum for refugees is often unavailable. This chapter explores how measures which hinder access to asylum have been challenged under human rights law, including how the EU’s Dublin System allocating responsibility for asylum claims between Member States has been constrained by human rights norms. The ECtHR has developed its concept of jurisdiction in a manner apt to subject some extraterritorial border measures to legal scrutiny, and has also placed a break on transfers of asylum seekers under the Dublin System. The chapter explores various points of friction between EU law and the ECHR, including in the CJEU’s Dublin case law.