Norm localisation and migration laws in the Maghreb

Abstract

In the 2000s, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria have proceeded to revise their outdated laws regulating the movements of people across national borders. Such timely legislative action has been deemed to be the result of the European Union’s external policy on transferring its restrictive migration governance to neighbouring countries. The legal framework emerging from the Maghreb reforms does appear to have broadly converged towards restrictive migratory policies. However, the paper outlines how such policy convergence has been in part achieved through a localisation of international legal norms, which did not result in an approximation to international and EU law. Ultimately, the paper sets out to show how migratory laws in the Maghreb do play a part in the externalisation of the EU’s border control, but do so by actually departing from the same international and EU normative standards that the Union has been promoting to its Maghreb neighbours.