Externalisation, Access to Territorial Asylum, and International Law

The paper starts by offering a distinctive conceptualisation of ‘externalisation’ as a process that can impinge on access to asylum in the territory of States (section 2). It then seeks to identify the overarching international law principles that govern the kinds of conduct that externalisation in this field tends to involve (section 3). An analysis of the international law parameters of externalisation is then presented, firstly for externalised border controls – with extraterritorial pushbacks of refugees and others taken here as a prime example (section 4), and secondly for externalised asylum systems – focusing on third country processing of asylum claims, as the greatest source of concern in this regard (section 5). We end by exploring issues of accountability that arise in both contexts (section 6).