Justice in the Jungle: Litigation and Judicial Violence in Calais Refugee Camps at the French–UK Border

Abstract

This contribution critically addresses the migration-as-crisis framework by focusing on litigation in the case of camp evictions in Calais, on the French–British border. Courts are spaces of confrontation between actors (judges, lawyers, activists, exiles, etc.) who have different conceptions of migration, of fundamental rights, and of the ways of guaranteeing them. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork methodology (interviews with judges, lawyers, and activist legal supporters of migrants; observations of hearings; and administrative and police archives and documents) and drawing upon socio-legal scholarship, this article underlines how the “migration-public order” nexus influences the way courts address migration by reducing the effectiveness of some basic legal principles and fundamental rights. In particular, I focus on the social construction of judicial decisions and the instrumentalization of justice resulting in creating judicial violence: I argue that this judicial violence at the border is paradigmatic of a “justice crisis” which has direct effects on the agency of legal supporters (lawyers and activist legal experts), who try to defend the rights of exiles through judicial tools, and ultimately on their (lack of) confidence in justice.