'Enforcing Passport Apartheid through EU Law: From Internal Market to the Polish Border': CELS Seminar

Professor Dimitry Kochenov (Central European University) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Enforcing Passport Apartheid through EU Law: From Internal Market to the Polish Border" on 23 February 2022 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CELS (the Centre for European Legal Studies). Biography: Dimitry Kochenov leads the Rule of Law Research Group at the Central European University Democracy Institute in Budapest and is Professor of Global Citizenship and Values at the CEU Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. He is also visiting professor of citizenship and the rule of law at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. Prof. Kochenov taught different aspects of citizenship, constitutional and EU law worldwide, including at Princeton, Oxford, Groningen, Turin and Osaka and published widely on these issues. His most recent book (Citizenship, MIT Press 2019) has been translated into several languages and reviewed in The New York Review of Books. Dimitry consults governments and international organizations on the matters of his academic interest and served as the founding chairman of the Investment Migration Council (Geneva). Abstract: The European Union is a clear-cut example of the passport apartheid in action, where blood-based statuses of attachment to public authority distributed at birth (citizenships), which predetermine the course of life of all of us to a great degree are taken particularly seriously. The contribution will elaborate on this starting point using two examples showcasing the EU law-based aspects of this global system of injustice: the near complete exclusion of non-EU citizens from the fundamental freedoms in the EU and the pro-active stance of the Union and the Member States in ensuring that the right to seek asylum in the EU is turned into an unworkable proclamation. The two examples will allow enriching a general sketch of what passport apartheid is and which role is played by it in the contemporary world elaborated by Prof. Kochenov in the I-CON with a focus at the global level: https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/18/4/1525/6169921. The analysis of the two examples suggests that the EU is a deeply atypical constitutional system in that it assumes that the core of its law should not apply to those who 'do not belong' by default, including, largely, the idea of the Union's very existence as a territory of directly enforceable supranational rights. This starting position fetishising the personal status of legal attachment to the Union makes the European integration project the best case study for passport apartheid in the world, since all the other legal systems are never as explicit in excluding the foreigners from the most essential rights by default. The atypical nature of the Union on this count is significantly undertheorized and this paper aims to start bridging the gap between the reality of EU law and the numerous proclamations about the Union's equitable value-laden nature. For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series