European Union’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum: Enhancing the Legal Protection of Refugees and Asylum Seekers or Restoring the Old Paradigm?

In this article, I seek to examine how the legal and political changes introduced by the European Union’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum enhance the legal protection of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing to the EU territory across the central Mediterranean migration route. Empirically drawing on the discourse of the European Commission representatives and the discourse around the new Pact on Migration and Asylum, I will engage in analyzing the EU’s human-focused narrative about migration management that the Pact promotes. The emphasis is put on how the dominant legal categories, in particular the category of refugee, are (re)constructed and the purposes such re-articulation has for the rights of the people on the move. Situating the study into critical legal theoretical framework, my aim is to demonstrate that although the EU’s new narrative acknowledges migrants’ vulnerable position, persons in need of international protection are simultaneously put into the discursive frame of irregularity – the same discourse the EU is vehemently fighting against. Hence, due to the conceptual ambivalence of the legal identities, under the new Pact, the persons legally entitled to protection will find it more difficult to claim their right to safe asylum in the EU.