When: Thursday, May 23, 2024, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PMWhere: Queen Mary University of London, 327 Mile End Road London E1 4NS
‘…if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?’ Judith Butler, Precarious Lives: The Power of Mourning and Justice, 2004
Concealing the very existence of people at borders has become a pervasive pattern in global bordering systems, best exemplified by the practices of ‘pushbacks’ and ‘offshoring’. The visibility of people at borders importantly relates to the visibility of state border violence. Practitioners, advocates, and academics have increasingly relied on the language and legal frameworks of enforced disappearances, secret detention and kidnapping to address this covert bordering violence. The purpose of this roundtable discussion is to bring together those working to ‘reveal’ bordering violence through investigative reporting and litigation.
The speakers will address the emerging ways in which evidence and ‘testimony’ are collected in the context of state’s concealing violent border practices. They will speak to different methodological approaches and related challenges. The roundtable will critically consider the relation of this evidence gathering to knowledge production, and whether ‘testimony’ becomes a form of resistance for people encountering border violence. Fundamentally, this session considers the purpose of concealing violent bordering practices.
Attendance in free but registration is required.
Dr Grażyna Baranowska is a senior researcher at the Hertie School’s Centre for Fundamental Rights and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2021-2024 she led a project on missing migrants, funded by the European Union through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Her research and teaching cover several topics in the areas of international law, international human rights law, and migration law, with special focus on disappeared and missing persons, border violence, and memory laws. Next to her academic activities, she is a member of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances. She has previously worked as a Policy Advisor on enforced disappearances in the German Institute for Human Rights and was involved in drafting the General Comment on enforced disappearances and migration of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances. She has also advised and trained litigators to UN bodies and the European Court of Human Rights and made submissions to the European Court of Human Rights in migration cases.
Hanaa Hakiki works as a Senior Legal Advisor at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), an NGO addressing grave human rights violations through transnational legal interventions. Since 2014, her work focuses on border rights, and more specifically on litigating the informal handling of migrants by states at European borders (“pushbacks”) in front of international bodies. She has supported cases against Spain, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia and Slovenia in front of the European Court of Human Rights and UN treaty bodies. Previously, Hanaa trained as a lawyer in England, where she specialised in litigation again the state for law-enforcers’ violence, detention and institutional racism.
Klaas van Dijken is co-founder and director of Lighthouse Reports. As investigative journalist and editor, his works focusses on human rights violations at Europe’s borders and the involvement of governments and state-funded agencies. Before Lighthouse, Klaas worked as a conflict reporter and investigative journalist in Eastern and Central Africa and Afghanistan. His work has been published worldwide in print, online and tv. Lighthouse Reports were recently involved in revelations that French police were carrying out ‘pullbacks’ in the Channel, and published a reconstruction of the deadly fire in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico that killed 40 men in March 2023.
Christina Varvia is currently a Research Fellow and formerly the Deputy Director and Lead Researcher of Forensic Architecture. She was trained as an architect and has taught a Diploma unit (MArch) at the Architectural Association (2018-2020). She was also a member of the Technology Advisory Board for the International Criminal Court (2018) and a research fellow at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2020-2023) where she co-curated the Forensic Architecture exhibition Witnesses. Currently, Christina is a Lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture, at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as pursuing her PhD at Aarhus University where her research focuses on biopolitics and imaging of the human body. She is a founding member and the chair of the board of Forensis: the Berlin-based association established by Forensic Architecture, and a founding member and co-director of the Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens (FAIĀ).
Amanda Brown is a human rights lawyer and a second-year PhD researcher at QMUL School of Law. Her professional and academic work focuses on migration and asylum, border violence, racial discrimination, and the law of the sea. Amanda is part of legal teams representing survivors of border violence in international and European fora, she provides pro bono assistance to Afghan nationals seeking resettlement to the US, and she has advised NGOs conducting search and rescue operations and human rights monitoring. She trained as a lawyer in the US and is pending final admission to the State Bar of New Mexico. Amanda's doctoral research examines Greek and Italian port access restrictions which have affected refugees and migrants, exploring the possibility of categorising such port restrictions as unlawful acts of racial discrimination under international and European law. Her past published work has engaged with issues of citizenship stripping and statelessness, the enforced disappearance of migrants, European violations of non-refoulement, and the role of Frontex in the Mediterranean.
Ellen Allde is a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow at the QMUL School of Law. Ellen’s PhD research addresses the new Closed Controlled Access Centres (CCACs) on the EU hotspot islands in Greece, drawing from empirical research with women (im)mobilised on the islands and by doing legal advocacy for the organisation I Have Rights. She writes on the continuing impact of pushbacks for those held in the CCACs, including the barriers to asylum procedures and bringing forward testimony of bordering violence. The work develops Butler’s derealisation and Mbembe’s necropolitics to address the ways people are made spectral to justify an endless, deadly violence in bordering Europe. Ellen continues to undertake work with I Have Rights as a member of their Strategic Litigation Team. Ellen is also a Teaching Fellow in International Refugee Law at Queen Mary, a Research Affiliate of the Refugee Law Initiative, and a member of the Women in Refugee Law (WiRL) and Immigration Law Practitioners Association (ILPA). She was called to the Bar of England & Wales with Inner Temple at the Hilary Ceremony 2022.
Founded in 2022, the (B)Orders Centre focuses on the study of bordering, ordering and othering processes through law. It constitutes an excellence hub for intellectual collaboration and the evaluation of the role of law in the making and unmaking of borders and their impact on global (im)mobility. It connects scholars within and beyond Queen Mary Law School to harness existing inter- and multi-disciplinary research into law, borders and (im)mobility and shape future policy and research agendas in response to global challenges.
Mobile People: Mobility as a way of life is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme at Queen Mary University of London. The programme involves twenty-one PhD research projects beginning in 2018, based in various schools across the university. These projects are concerned with how the world is being dynamically constituted by mobile people in active and novel ways, and how this affects fundamental social and political institutions.