{"id":499,"date":"2016-02-19T18:49:19","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T18:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/?p=499"},"modified":"2016-04-14T14:14:34","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T14:14:34","slug":"lecture-by-prof-david-miller-feb-2016-the-duty-to-rescue-boat-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/2016\/02\/19\/lecture-by-prof-david-miller-feb-2016-the-duty-to-rescue-boat-people\/","title":{"rendered":"David Miller – The Duty to Rescue Boat People"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo:\u00a0U.S. Navy<\/p><\/div>\n

What obligations, if any, does a state in Europe have towards boat people attempting dangerous sea crossings?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was the question Professor David Miller from Oxford University addressed on 4 February 2016 in a well-attended lecture hosted by Edinburgh University\u2019s Global Justice Academy<\/a> and Just World Institute<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Professor Miller began his talk by noting the 2014 UK government decision not to support Triton, a search-and-rescue operation proposed by the EU that could have potentially saved the lives of sea-crossing migrants, or \u201cboat people\u201d. \u00a0The main reasoning behind this decision was the claim that search-and-rescue encourages people to attempt dangerous sea crossings in the greater expectation of being rescued, and therefore, in the long term, will bring about more deaths.\u00a0 This seems to be a consequentialist argument that considers effects of alternative ways of using resources in order to minimise the loss of lives overall.\u00a0 Meanwhile, critics argue that European states have stringent obligations to protect rights of migrants.\u00a0 But is it true that the critics\u2019 argument occupies the moral high ground while the UK government\u2019s argument is morally defective? \u00a0The answer Professor Miller gave us was: \u2018Not necessarily\u2019.<\/p>\n

The first step Professor Miller chose to take was to offer several reasons why the duty to rescue under the international law of the sea does not apply straightforwardly to the case of rescuing boat people.\u00a0 In doing so, he highlighted several issues that arise distinctively when thinking about the ethics of rescue that apply particularly to seaborne migration of immigrants and refugees.<\/p>\n

He, then, invited us to look more closely at one of those issues: the issue that setting up a search-and-rescue programme is likely to encourage more migrants to make dangerous sea crossings in the expectation of being rescued (i.e. the moral hazard issue).\u00a0 And he asked us: Is it justifiable for a state government to take this issue into account when deciding which policy to adopt?\u00a0 Or, in other words, is it morally permissible for the state government to take the consequentialist position when deciding which policy to adopt?<\/p>\n

In order to say \u2018it is\u2019, Professor made a distinction between emergency situations, which are by nature unpredictable, and more routine and foreseeable circumstances in which people are likely to find themselves in need of help.\u00a0 In the former situations, he argued, a duty to rescue<\/p>\n

\"D.Miller<\/a><\/p>\n

arises just from the direct confrontation between a person to be rescued and a rescuer.\u00a0 So, in those situations, we do not think about wider consequences of carrying out rescue.\u00a0 But, Professor Miller continued, there is an important moral difference between the team of persons who directly confront a rescue situation and a collective body such as a government having to design a rescue system to cover a range of future eventualities.\u00a0 Since the aim of any system is to minimise the number of injuries or deaths, it would be self-defeating if the number of injuries or deaths increased as people came to rely on the existence of the system and began to take unnecessary risks.\u00a0 So, in the case of routine and foreseeable circumstances, he explained, it is relevant to think about wider consequences of what is being proposed.\u00a0 And there is, therefore, an important difference between the situation that rescuing ships actually confront when rescuing boat people, where the direct duty applies, and the position of the government having to decide whether there should or should not be a certain rescue mission.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But what if the government in question is also partly responsible for the situation now causing boat people to make their journeys?\u00a0 If so, the government has obligations of remedial justice, and these obligations cannot be eliminated by appealing to negative consequences of setting up a search-and-rescue programme.<\/p>\n

Here, Professor Miller pointed out two ways in which European states might be held responsible for creating refugee flows.\u00a0 First, those states might have played active roles in the interventions that caused instability in the societies from which refugees are coming.\u00a0 Second, those states might have failed to respond adequately to refugee flows by providing a variety of channels through which asylum can be claimed.\u00a0 If the charge is the former, it seems easy to argue that European states have obligations of redress that would cancel consequentialist reasoning.\u00a0 But if the charge is the latter, Professor continued, it becomes much harder to argue this.<\/p>\n

Another important issue that arises distinctively when thinking about the ethics of rescue that applies to the case of boat people is that, arguably, boat people voluntarily put themselves into the position where rescue is needed.\u00a0 This is a controversial claim because boat people are not in the position where they can make a fully rational or completely free choice.\u00a0 They are driven by desperation and ill-informed of likely consequences of their actions.\u00a0 However, they are not being forced to embark on dangerous sea journeys.\u00a0 So, they do, according to Professor Miller, make a decision to a certain degree.\u00a0 And at least in this sense, they are responsible for actively putting themselves into the situation where rescue is necessary.\u00a0 How does this fact affect the duty of rescue?<\/p>\n

Professor Miller acknowledged that this fact does not necessarily eliminate the duty of rescue as far as immediate rescue in emergency situations is concerned.\u00a0 But as far as the duty of a state government is concerned, Professor argued, migrants\u2019 responsibility for putting themselves on the boats does qualify it.<\/p>\n

For arguing this, Professor presupposed what he called a \u2018natural division of responsibility\u2019.\u00a0 His core point was this.\u00a0 On the one hand, we ought to protect each other from routine everyday perils through practices of mutual aid.\u00a0 On the other hand, we ought to take responsibility when we voluntarily choose to take unusual risks.\u00a0 If we take this view, it seems hard to argue that a European state has a duty to take active steps to set up a system to rescue boat people, who, according to Professor, have chosen voluntarily to place themselves in danger that goes beyond routine risks.<\/p>\n

Professor then turned to the question about the content of the duty of rescue.<\/p>\n

What exactly must a rescuing ship do with boat people it has rescued?\u00a0 First, it has to offload them somewhere on dry land.\u00a0 But, from an ethical viewpoint, it would be insufficient to return boat people to the place they had set out from, if the place in question had no competent authority able to protect their human rights securely (e.g. Libya).\u00a0 So, second, the rescuing ship ought to find a place where boat people will not be left in any imminent danger of injury or death.<\/p>\n

\"Prof.<\/a><\/p>\n

What a state government must do with boat people?\u00a0 Professor takes the duty a state government has towards boat people to be grounded in a shared responsibility that all capable states have to protect human rights.\u00a0 If so, general principles for distributing responsibility should apply (e.g. backward-looking considerations about who has created the situation that has produced refugees, forward-looking considerations about who has the greatest capacity to take them in to provide protection for their human rights, etc.).\u00a0 So, there is no reason to say that responsibility should be devolved to states that happen to be physically closest to the place where a rescue takes place.<\/p>\n

Professor\u2019s talk also covered several institutional proposals.\u00a0 One of them was on a pooling station, outside of Europe (e.g. Turkey, Tunisia, etc.), to which boat people could be brought for assessment, together with a commitment on the part of each European state to take in some proportion of those found to have legitimate asylum claims.\u00a0 This, he argued, must be preferable to the random way in which the burden of admitting migrants is now distributed because their final destinations can be decided more carefully.\u00a0 Moreover, the incentive problem will be partly addressed because, under this system, boat people rescued from the Mediterranean do not necessarily get entry to Europe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The talk was thought-provoking and invited a lot of interesting questions from the audience.\u00a0 Some of them were about empirical claims Professor employed.\u00a0 One of them was about dis\/analogy between boat people at sea and people fleeing from the floods in Northern England.\u00a0 Another was about the way European borders work and how it might make sea crossings harder.<\/p>\n

Seaborne migration is a real global challenge. \u00a0How we, in the receiving societies, ought to react to this issue is a big question.\u00a0 And this question needs to be answered with careful deliberation, since the decisions made will affect many people\u2019s lives.\u00a0 Professor Miller\u2019s discussion is a significant contribution to the debate.<\/p>\n

Written by Yuki Iwaki<\/a> and Kieran Oberman<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

David Miller<\/a> is Professor of Political Theory at Oxford University and Official Fellow at Nuffield College.\u00a0 His work is well known for its use of empirical evidence to inform philosophical debates. \u00a0His publications include: On Nationality<\/em> (Clarendon Press, 1995), Principles of Social Justice<\/em> (Harvard University Press, 1999), Citizenship and National Identity<\/em> (Polity Press, 2000), National Responsibility and Global Justice<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2007), and Justice for Earthlings<\/em> (Cambridge University Press, 2013). His most recent book, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration<\/em>, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What obligations, if any, does a state in Europe have towards boat people attempting dangerous sea crossings? This was the question Professor David Miller from Oxford University addressed on 4 February 2016 in a well-attended lecture hosted by Edinburgh University\u2019s Global Justice Academy and Just World Institute. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":189,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,23,22,8,1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/189"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}