By Land and Sea
Combating Migrant Smuggling by Sea in Spain: Judicial Use of the Information Obtained from the Victims and Frontex View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Fernandez Rojo
31,219 irregular migrants arrived to Spain in 2022 and more than 90% of them resorted to the services provided by migrant smuggling networks. This paper analyses the judicial use of the information gathered from the debriefed migrants who were smuggled by sea. The victims, who decide to collaborate with the competent authorities, are considered protected witnesses and their testimonies, due to the risk of not being reachable at the trial hearing, are introduced in the judicial proceedings as pre-constituted evidence. Given the exceptional nature of this type of evidence, the European Court of Human Rights, the Spanish Constitutional Court and the Spanish Supreme Court require that the evidence be complemented with objective elements. In this regard, this paper reveals that the photographs taken by the EU’s decentralized agency, Frontex, are external corroborations that reinforce the statements made by the migrants identifying the boat masters as members of a migrant smuggling network.
Migration as Reparations: Addressing Colonial Legacies and Neo-Colonial Subjugation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aniseh Bro
Many nations in the Global South are still experiencing the lasting economic inequities created by colonization and enforced by present day economic structures, all of which are compounded by climate change. As such, migration has become an increasingly common response among individuals and households experiencing the economic and environmental pressures associated with these systems. In this article, we argue that the inclusion of individuals from the Global South in the Global North should be considered as a form of reparations for individuals from these regions to address the historical injustices of colonialism and the ongoing impact of neo-colonial subjugation. We argue that inclusion of these peoples into the Global North is not only a humanitarian imperative but also a form of redress for the exploitation and inequality perpetuated by historical and contemporary global economic structures, and use data from focus groups of migrants in Canada to study the relationship between economic development initiatives, such as mining operations, and the complex and interconnected economic and environmental drivers of migration decisions.
Beyond Push-Pull Factors: Exploring the Phenomenon of Migrant Agency
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Annita Montoute
Often, migrant agency carries negative connotations in the literature, such as having adverse socio-economic and political impacts on the host country – and the sending country - in some cases. In other instances, migrants are stripped of their agency and viewed as victims and powerless actors being rescued and empowered by the government, inter-governmental bodies and civil society. The latter, in particular, are often the ones speaking and acting on behalf of migrants and refugees. There is less scholarly attention on migrants’ agency as positive, migrant agency from the point of view of, and the interventions of migrants themselves. Utilizing the agent-structure relationship approaches to agency and based on a case study of Venezuelan migrants in Trinidad and Tobago, the paper seeks to understand how migrants have exercised agency and the factors that inhibit or facilitate their agency. Using secondary sources and interview data, the guiding questions are: what are, and what informs the goals of Venezuelan migrants in Trinidad and Tobago? How do they seek to accomplish their goals? What are the factors that help or hinder those goals? How successful are they at accomplishing these goals? By integrating migrant perspectives, the paper will empower the migrant in migration studies, strengthen migrant policy and civil society advocacy in this sphere.
