The European Documentation Centre (EDC) will host Professor Michelle Pace (Roskilde University, Denmark) on Monday 19 February at 17:30.
Prof. Michelle Pace will present her contribution in a book entitled 'Syrian Refugee Children in the Middle East and Europe: Integrating the Young and Exiled'.
Professor Pace, together with Somdeep Sen is a co-editor of this publication which will be published in March 2018.
Abstract of the presentation
The EU-Turkey deal and the impact on refugee children
The EU-Turkey deal and the impact on refugee children
Is the EU losing its legitimacy as a normative power and promoter of human rights? At the end of May 2016 humanitarian groups revealed that children as young as nine were risking their lives in desperate attempts to reach Europe as the number of unaccompanied child refugees arriving on smugglers' boats soared (HRW, 2015). This lecture focuses on the EU-Turkey deal and specifically on its impact on refugee children. I acknowledge that the EU finds itself in a long lasting moral conundrum when dealing with, on the one hand, what has been the most pressing issue for European citizens since the first half of 2016 (migration) and, on the other hand, its ethical and legal obligations - and those of its member states - under the UN convention on the rights of the child. This conundrum is getting even more challenging to resolve with the attempted July 2016 coup in Turkey and Erdogan鈥檚 authoritarian responses to his opponents ever since the coup attempt. The overarching question we are left to discuss is thus whether the EU is about to lose its legitimacy as a normative power and as a promoter of human rights in our contemporary times.
Places are limited and can be booked by sending an email to: stefan.bezzina@um.edu.mt.
