A Short History of Smuggling of Migrants in International Law

Abstract

Andreas Schloenhardt describes how the turn to criminalization of migrant smuggling has to be seen against the background of the post-Cold War period and the clamp-down by Western states on smuggling across their borders, reconstructed now as a security threat. The fact that this criminalization remains in tension with the relative neglect of migrant’s human rights he argues, reveals the true nature of the Protocol as a suppression convention.