Europe and Extraterritorial Asylum

Abstract

The disaster off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, in October 2013, in which several hundred migrants and asylum seekers drowned after their overloaded boat capsized, highlights both the desperation of people on the move and the failure of states and the European Union to come up with an adequate response to the problem of global migration. Maarten den Heijer’s latest book, Europe and Extraterritorial Asylum, deals with some of the issues surrounding this problem. While the title of the book gives the impression that the author addresses the activities of the EU in the field of extraterritorial asylum, this is not exactly the case. The author focuses mostly on the obligations of the state, but refers to ‘EU member states’, giving the impression that there is some additional or distinct obligation on the part of the EU. The author could as well have referred to ‘any state bound by...