State Responsibility for the Death and Disappearance of Refugees and Migrants

ongoing

SRDDRM will provide the very first comprehensive, substantive research output on the attribution of state responsibility for the death and disappearance of refugees and migrants. Despite it being a critical question of public international law (“PIL”), international refugee law (“IRL”), international human rights law (“IHRL”), international law on human trafficking, international migration law, and law of diplomatic and consular protection, a singular authoritative legal source on SRDDRM does not currently exist. Though several resources have been published that address SRDDRM directly, none comprehensively map the legal framework relative to it or incorporate extensive case studies. As a result, no single source exists in international law to determine the rules of attribution of international responsibility, relative to deaths and disappearances of refugees and migrants. SRDDRM will fill this gap. It will provide a single comprehensive source of international law, based on extensive original research in critical geographic locations where deaths and disappearances of refugees and migrants occur at an extremely high rate. These include the Darién Gap separating Colombia and Panama, the US-Mexico border, the Channel Crossing between France and the United Kingdom, the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, and the three most common Mediterranean Crossings between Morocco and Spain, Libya and Italy, and Turkey and Greece/Cyprus. Supervised by Professor Siobhán Mullally – Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights and current UN Special Rapporteur for trafficking in persons – the researcher, a doctor of PIL with specialisation in IRL and state responsibility, will undertake SRDDRM at the host institution, University of Galway, who has successfully hosted 30 Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowships in Horizon 2020 and is currently hosting 9 Horizon Europe fellowships.