CRS Seminar: Safe third country concept: A tool for containment and illegalization of mobility

April 15, 2026

2:00 - 3:30pm (ET / Toronto)

This is a virtual event

Zoom: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/qCUT9QB3SCqX-w2Wq9o5lw

Guest Speaker: Gamze Ovacık, Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University Faculty of Law Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism

Abstract:

The current global mobility paradigm is geared towards stopping and deterring the arrival of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants to the Global North through policies for externalization of migration control. Externalization is the strategy of shifting migration control functions, such as border controls or processing of asylum applications, that are normally undertaken by a state within its own territory, to another state territory. The safe third country (“STC”) concept is a prime example of policies for externalization of migration control: it implies that when refugees do not arrive in a state directly from a country where their fundamental rights are at risk, they can be sent back to ‘safe third countries’ they passed through that are willing to accept their return. This talk frames externalization measures, and specifically STC practices, as the embodiment of the fundamental problems in the global mobility regime by reinforcing of the containment trend. Based on an analysis of STC practices in Europe and North America, specifically in EU-Turkey and Canada-USA contexts, this talk problematizes the arrangements that contain refugees in conditions where they cannot access effective protection. The EU-Turkey context underlines the containment aspect as a case of unbalanced distribution of responsibility for refugee protection in the region. Whereas the Canada-USA context demonstrates the constructed illegalization of human mobility as a result of policy interventions. Considering that North America and Europe comprise a significant portion of the Global North, an analysis that interlinks them demonstrates that their externalization practices contribute to shaping a common regressive trajectory of the global mobility regime, one that prioritizes the containment of human mobility at the expense of human rights.

Bio:

Gamze Ovacık is a Postdoctoral Researcher at McGill University Faculty of Law Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism and a Part-Time Faculty at Concordia University Political Science Department. Previously, she was an assistant professor at Başkent Law School and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg, within the ASILE Project on global asylum governance and the European Union’s role. She specializes in migration and asylum law, and her current research focuses on policies for the externalization of migration control, judicial practices on asylum, and third-world approaches to global mobility. Gamze is the coordinator of the Externalisation Working Group of the Refugee Law Initiative hosted at the University of London.