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Externalising migration controls is the act of a State to delegate to a neighboring state the mission of controlling the border of the first on its own territory, generally assuming the violations of human rights associated with it. The situation found in Calais, but also on the French coast, on the Belgian and Dutch coast adjacent to the British border, as in Italy at the French border, but also the Swiss and Austrian borders (see here and here).

Italy has just expelled forty-eight Sudanese exiles arrested in Ventimiglia on the French border, to Sudan.

The Schengen area was a space in which border controls between Member States had been abolished, at a time when the Schengen Agreement on the free movement of persons was one of the pillars of European integration. Today, all the neighboring states of Italy, except Slovenia, have restored the controls at their borders with it, Austria  even building a wall on the border . Excepting Slovenia because the migrants come from the Balkans via Slovenia to Italy, and from there to other countries. Slovenia however has built a razor wire fence with its neighbor Croatia member of the European Union.

The Franco-Italian border once again has border controls. On the French side, racial profiling, unlawful refoulement of asylum seekers and minors, police violence, arrests, detention and deportation to their country of European showing solidarity, legal poursuits against French citizens, solidarity offence has never been used as much as by the current government. On the Italian side, using an old law from the Mussolini regime to prohibit the stay people showing solidarity on the territory of Ventimiglia, raids and sending people to ‘reception’ centers in the south of Italy, police violence, and now roundups and deportation to Sudan, where the dictator is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In the European game, with the creation of “hotspots” to which are brought the exiles intercepted in the Mediterranean Sea, the fingerprints of migrants are taken more systematically under the supervision of the European agency Frontex, this makes Italy the country responsible for the asylum application in the vast majority of cases, according to the European regulation, Dublin III. To balance things out, the European Union has set up a refugee relocation mechanism in Italy (and Greece) to other European countries, but this mechanism does not work. If Italy expels to a dangerous country like Sudan under Italo-Sudanese agreements applying since last May, courts in other European countries should cancel people being sent back under Dublin III to Italy.

You want to become guinea pigs in relations between European States? Welcome in Europe.

This expulsion has left traces on activists media:

http://www.gettingthevoiceout.org/italie-deportation-de-40-soudanais-24082016/

http://dirittiefrontiere.blogspot.fr/2016/08/espulsioni-dirette-illecito.html

Classic Italian media:

https://news.vice.com/it/article/italia-rimpatri-migranti-violazioni

A British tabloid:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/703923/Italy-breaking-point-migrants-send-back-Sudan-chartered-plane

No French media discoverable by search engines, altough it is outsourcing on Italian soil control the French border.

And that France and the UK are driving countries of the Khartoum process, which is the general framework of this expulsion, which aims to deal with states migrants escape from to prevent them from reaching Europe.