Executive power in migration has been shifting towards EU agencies to counter the implementation gap, while enhancing intra-EU solidarity. An increasingly integrated administration stirs the challenges of fundamental rights oversight, accountability, and agency (in)dependence. Lilian Tsourdi is an Assistant Professor and Dutch Research Council grantee (NWO VENI) at the Law Faculty of Maastricht University, as well as a visiting professor at Sciences Po Paris.
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Abstract
Executive power in EU migration policy is shifting. The theory of executive federalism broadly underpinned its initial implementation design. Instead, an increasingly integrated administration is emerging. EU agencies play a key role in this transformation. Dr Tsourdi analyses patterns of joint implementation, with experts deployed by EU agencies involved in areas such as the processing of asylum claims, and return. She scrutinizes the emergence of agency functions which hold steering potential. These developments create obvious tensions with the agencies’ governance structures which are largely intergovernmental, and influenced by strong regulators. Lilian reflects on how these internal governance structures can be squared with independence. Developments also bring to sharp relief the challenges of fundamental rights oversight and accountability. She will comment on how these can be ensured in an evolving administrative landscape.
Speaker
Lilian is an Assistant Professor and Dutch Research Council grantee (NWO VENI) at the Law Faculty of Maastricht University, as well as a visiting professor at Sciences Po Paris. She is a member of the coordination team of the Academic Network for Legal Studies on Immigration and Asylum in Europe, the ‘Odysseus Network’. Lilian previously held academic positions at the Refugee Studies Centre of the University of Oxford, and the Law Faculty and the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute (EUI). She obtained her PhD from the Law Faculty and the Institute for European Studies of the ULB.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of EU Law, Public International Law, and public policy/administration with a focus on human rights, asylum, migration, and governance theories. She has been awarded two grants as Principal Investigator: a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship by the European Commission and a VENI grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). She has published her research widely in important publishing houses and journals (e.g. Human Rights Law Review, German Law Journal, Common Market Law Review). Her monograph on the constitutional foundations and administrative governance of the EU asylum policy is forthcoming in Oxford University Press (2021).