‘All because of human rights’

This chapter shifts the focus to Europe, where legislative reforms similarly accelerated the classification of criminal non-citizens as deportable. At the same time, the ratification of numerous progressive international treaties significantly strengthened the legal position of migrants in this part of the world. Human rights safeguards increasingly complicated efforts to deport or otherwise remove undesirable migrants. Across Europe, the intersection of criminality and the principle of non-refoulement proved to be a cocktail of legal and political controversy, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom, where it became a central issue in the lead-up to the Brexit campaign. The chapter also examines how countries like France, Belgium, and Norway grappled with the challenge of developing coherent and legally sound policies to address the problem of undesirable but unremovable migrants.