Unpacking the Safe Third Country Concept in the European Union: B/orders, Legal Spaces, and Asylum in the Shadow of Externalization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Since its origins in the 1980s, the concept of safe third country (STC) has increasingly been used to deter and curb ‘irregular migrant’ arrivals. A burgeoning body of research has considered these measures throughout the world, particularly in the European Union (EU), Canada, Australia, and the United States. While much STC scholarship has been doctrinal in nature and has focused on the protection standards required in a third State, some of the literature has also examined more theoretical questions. Against this background, this article explores the consequences of the STC concept for refugees and their (in)ability to seek and enjoy asylum by drawing on critical border studies literature. The article first conceptualizes this concept with reference to theories of bordering, dissecting the STC concept as a bordering tool which constructs subjects as worthy and unworthy of protection, and decides where the latter are to be protected. It then explores how this concept has been operationalized within the EU’s Common European Asylum System and the implications of this phenomenon for refugees, using the Greek–Turkish context as a case study. The article particularly considers the developments after the EU–Türkiye Statement of 18 March 2016 and a joint ministerial decision of 8 June 2021 by which Greece formally designated Türkiye as a STC. It reveals that while these measures came in response to the so-called irregular arrivals at the Greek–Turkish border, thousands of refugees affected by these measures have been either removed from the Greek territory and returned to Türkiye without protection, or trapped in limbo in Greece because of their removal from the EU asylum system. The article demonstrates that the STC concept, which is increasingly used as a bordering practice, spatially and temporally prevents certain people from being recognized and treated as refugees in accordance with the Refugee Convention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".