The 2015 Mediterranean Migration Crisis and European Human Rights Values: Security Comes Before R2P

One of the most pressing challenges confronting the contemporary world is illegal migration, a phenomenon exacerbated by a plethora of compounding factors including, , climate change, demographic shifts, economic shocks, fragile social fabric, and growing political instability, It was also motivated by excessive restrictions on legal and admission regimes, almost exclusively imposed by the target Northern countries, contributing to the rise in using hazardous routes, by migrants and refugees, usually relying on smugglers or, traffickers, triggering problematic repercussions at their end as well those of both the transit and receiving countries,

The migration crisis dates back to 2015 when the flow of migrants and refugees jumped from 153,000 in 2008 to more than 1 million in 2015. This was primarily due to the growing number of Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans and Eritreans fleeing war, ethnic conflict, or economic hardship. This has posed challenges to the EU on political, operational, security, and economic frontiers and raised questions on the trade off between approaches employed by the EU and a number of key human rights foundations of the EU.

This paper aims to analyze the response of the EU to the 2015 Migration Crisis and whether it has undermined European core human rights values.
It will deploy the Responsibility to Protect to check whether the EU responses have been determined by its own security consideration, from a realist perspective, or dictated by ones upholding liberal values enshrined in international conventions as well as in the Treaty on the European Union (TEU).