PhD position on Access to Justice and EU Enforcement Agencies (1.0 FTE)

The Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE) of the School of Law, Faculty Law, Economics and Governance is looking for a PhD on “Access to Justic and EU Enforcement Agencies”.
The project aims to thoroughly examine the emerging problem of access to justice for migrants subjected to the mandate of complex enforcement actors in the field of migration such as the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX). The expanding operational mandate of this agency has detrimentally affected access to remedies in cases of fundamental rights violations. This project, therefore, aims to devise access to justice safeguards that could be implemented by FRONTEX and contribute to the realisation of rights of migrants attempting to enter the European Union (EU).

The PhD candidate will focus on how the EU can ensure effective access to justice for migrants interacting with FRONTEX, especially when their fundamental rights have been violated. The candidate will undertake doctrinal legal and socio-legal research into the current EU legal order and its distinct phenomenon of ‘agencification’, namely the rise of EU decentralised agencies. The candidate will also undertake legal-empirical research, including fact-finding visits to ‘hotspots’ or temporary asylum reception facilities in frontline States, like Italy (Lampedusa, Pozzallo, Taranto), Greece (Lesvos, Chios, Samos), and interviews with relevant stakeholders. Finally, the candidate will undertake normative investigation into how the law should be shaped to guarantee effective access to justice. In this regard, the PhD candidate will develop a normative framework based on the European standards of access to justice as well as the values and principles stemming from the European constitutional context and human rights law.

This PhD project will be carried out within the Building block on Citizenship and Migration of the Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE) under the supervision of Prof. Paul Minderhoud, Dr. Julie Fraser, and Dr. Salvo Nicolosi. The PhD candidate will be employed at the Utrecht University Law School. RENFORCE focuses on the relationship between regulation and enforcement at the interplay of national, European and other levels of government as well as private spheres of regulatory enforcement. The RENFORCE Building block on Citizenship and Migration aims to theoretically contest the major divides between citizenship and migration by legally and empirically investigating the interconnection between these social and legal phenomena from the perspective of legislative and policy reforms as well as the enforcement of rights and norms.
The envisioned start date is 1 October 2022.