Soft Enforcement of EU Migration Law

This project will establish soft enforcement of EU migration law as a new research field in which legal and political science scholars will be equally active.

Migration is a salient issue for the EU, and we are witnessing deep shifts in the implementation and enforcement landscapes of EU migration law.

Traditional enforcement methods, such as Court of Justice proceedings initiated by the European Commission against Member States, have met their limit. Soft enforcement is becoming a flexible and politically palatable alternative.

For example, Fundamental Rights Offices have been established within EU migration agencies that operationalise novel Ombuds-type administrative accountability processes, and a peer review mechanism, run jointly by the Commission and Member States, has been integrated with the Schengen area of free movement.

SoftEn conceptualizes soft enforcement and unlocks the black box of its operationalisation in the context of migration.

It brings together theoretical insights from legal and political science on governance, enforcement, and accountability, combining legal analysis with empirical qualitative methods. Its groundbreaking nature lies in three characteristics.

First, the project will generate a new interdisciplinary, legally grounded and empirically informed theory of soft enforcement in the migration context.

Second, it will generate datasets on soft enforcement along three axes (steering policy implementation; supervising policy implementation; and ensuring actor accountability) across the EUs migration policies.

Moving beyond law on the books, it will also generate unique qualitative empirical insights at EU and selected national levels.

Third, it will generate a new evidence-informed governance framework for soft enforcement that can impact the work of public institutions at EU and national levels, and ultimately, individuals.