Abstract:

The “border control” and “refoulement” policies implemented in the face of human mobility towards Europe after the Arab Spring point to a move away from immigrant focus and constitute the body of EU migration governance. These policies are at the center of the criticisms directed to the EU on this topic. As an extension of these policies, certain processing centers have been established in Greece and Italy, into which immigrants are heavily entering, to identify the newly arrived immigrants and to evaluate their asylum applications by taking their fingerprints with the “hotspot approach” included in the European Agenda on Migration in April 2015. The afore-mentioned criticisms have intensified as migrants are kept under poor conditions in these centers, and are often deprived of their right to asylum. In this study, which has been constituted based on the data from the related governments and non-governmental organizations and the hotspots in Greece and Italy, as of dramatic examples in this concept, ‘the hotspot approach’ which is used as an externalization tool in migration governance is discussed in the frame of normative human rights and asserted as one of the most crucial setbacks in EU migration governance.