Regulating migration and asylum in the Maghreb: what inspirations for an accelerated legal development?

International audienceFrom the emergence of a ‘fortress Europe’ in the 1990s to the constitution of a ‘sentinel Maghreb’ in the 2000s, law has accompanied the evolution of migration policies on both sides of the Mediterranean. In the EU, the harmonisation of immigration and asylum policies has led to the revision of legislations in all the Member States on the basis of common standards and newly created norms. In the Maghreb States, the legal frameworks governing border crossing and migration have been reformed. Those developments in States devoid of any migration policy hitherto and particularly lacking in terms of law-making and -implementing have been largely attributed to the influence of their neighbourhood with the EU. However, the enactment of new laws to control migration as a core element of sovereignty and national security has also been a global trend since the mid-1990s. Diversity in the scope, content and implementation of Maghrebian reforms in the 2000s as well as more recent evolutions in the region confirm that legal development, if any, has been the result of a complex and country-specific process in which various and evolving cross-level factors have interacted