Este ciclo de palestras tem em vista expor e debater um conjunto de temas políticos que hoje constituem reptos de reflexão e da urgente reconfiguração da sociedade humana. Com este intuito convidamos um conjunto de especialistas a apresentarem preleções sobre os seguintes tópicos: rendimento básico incondicional; populismo; direitos Humanos e migrações; política do ambiente; cidades globais; política de género e comunicação política sobre pandemia. Realizadas em sala Zoom, estas palestras dirigem-se muito especialmente aos doutorandos em Ciência Política (UA/UBI) e Filosofia (UBI), estando abertas a investigadores do Praxis e dos Centros de Investigação parceiros destes doutoramentos. O título, resumo e link de cada palestra serão anunciados previamente à data da sua realização.

6 de janeiro de 2021 (17h30-19h30)

Guilherme Marques Pedro (UBI/UC), Human Rights and Migration: The Flying Dutchman Asymmetry: Individual Rights and State Obligations in the contemporary migration ethics debate

Bio-note

Guilherme Marques Pedro hold a PhD from the Department of International Politics in Aberystwyth University and a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. He currently teaches international relations and international law at the University of Beira Interior and at the University of Coimbra. His research interests lie in international political theory and the history of international law with a focus on the place of migration rights in the liberal tradition. He is also currently finishing his second PhD at the Department of Philosophy (Practical Ethics and the Philosophy of Law) in Uppsala University. In 2017 he published the book Reinhold Niebuhr and International Relations Theory with Routledge. In 2018 he also published a peer-reviewed article on Hans Morgenthau’s international legal theory. He is now finalising a monograph on migration ethics and law with a focus on the human right to leave.

Abstract

In the contemporary academic debate on migration rights the claim that the legal right to leave a state (RL) - enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (UDHR) - does not entail a legal right to enter another state (RE) has become widespread. This claim of non-entailment - RL ¬ͱ RE - is usually taken to be a descriptive statement about current international law, identifying a lacuna which places the migrant individual in a stranded legal position, namely that of having nowhere to go. This claim has also been put forth as a normative proposal, constituting an argument around the prescriptive claim that this lacuna is either legally necessary or morally justifiable and even desirable. Although phrased in different ways, this claim states the lack of a relation between two legal rights (RL and RE) as well as between their correlated (state) duties: ‘to let leave’ and ‘to let enter’. Indeed, in contemporary international treaties and conventions, states are legally required the former in a more unqualified manner than the latter, and this has led many to coin this aspect of the international legal and political order as ‘asymmetrical’. This claim faces a number of significant criticisms, apart from the obvious difficulty that there are indeed, under human rights law, at least two REs, namely the human right to return (RR) and the human right to seek and enjoy asylum (RA).

The main aim of this paper is to lay out and analyses this claim - as well as the counterclaim that there is ‘symmetry’ between RL and RE - a task which is preceded by the analysis of their key concepts and premises. The claim that RL entails RE and its counterclaim often come together with their twin prescriptive claims that exit and entry rights should be either ‘asymmetrical’ or ‘symmetrical’. After charting the debate between ‘asymmetrists’ and ‘symmetrists’ at both the descriptive and the prescriptive levels, I revisit human rights law to offer a more accurate description of the three human rights that together form the core legal norms of the contemporary international migration regime. A preliminary sketch of what is at stake in this paper is, however, in order before I enter that debate.

The view that in contemporary international law there is an RL but no RE has raised much controversy given that both rights are needed for international migration to occur legally, but states are only legally obliged to protect exit. Assymetrists’ claim to non-entailment has, for this reason, been criticised by symmetrists who think that in order for the human right to leave a country to be conceptually meaningful it must be legally enforceable via the institution of a human right to enter. If we follow symmetrists, international law undermines RL’s status as a legal right and hence, for advocates of entailment, the way to make RL an enforceable human right is by legally guaranteeing that it entails a legal right to enter a country. Symmetrists thus dismiss RL as a legally enforceable human right, but toward the end of this paper I explain why both asymmetrists and symmetrists neglect an important feature of the migration rights enshrined in the UDHR and in international law more generally.

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Michelle Macêdo (Political Science PhD student, UA/UBI) Sala Zoom (2h: 1h de apresentação + 1h de debate)

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