Justice delayed, justice denied. A case study of crimmigration and the infringement of human rights in the Mediterranean

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which crimmigration: the convergence of criminal and immigration law, infringes upon the human rights of migrants within the Mediterranean migration context, with particular focus on the El Hiblu 3 case in Malta. Using a qualitative case study approach and reflexive thematic analysis of eight media articles, it traces how crimmigration operates not through a single act but through an accumulation of mechanisms: the construction of a threatening migrant narrative, the application of maximalist criminal charges, and the prolonged legal proceedings that together produce a condition this thesis calls legal limbo. The thesis draws on the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to measure the conditions experienced by the El Hiblu 3 against Malta's binding human rights obligations. It argues that legal limbo: a state of prolonged procedural suspension between accusation and verdict, is itself a form of harm that the human rights framework was designed to prevent, and that slow violence, as theorized by Nixon, captures the cumulative and largely invisible nature of that harm. Malta is examined not as an exception but as a concentration of broader EU border governance logic, in which deterrence, externalization, and the criminalization of movement have consistently taken precedence over rights-based approaches to migration.