Since the early days of their recruitment as workers into Western Europe, Turkish citizens' immigration and residence rights have been curtailed by EU Member States even though the migration of Turkish citizens has not abated. Despite restrictive trends in the Member States and the EU, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has interpreted the obligations arising from the Ankara Agreement between Turkey and the EEC (1963), and its Additional Protocol (1970), to enhance the security of residence and employment status for Turkish citizen migrants. The UK did not participate in large-scale recruitment of workers from Turkey, but has experienced predominantly asylum migration from Turkey since the 1980s.
The robust interpretation of the Additional Protocol's 'standstill' provision which allows reliance on older rules for business persons and service providers (and receivers) has come to assume particular importance for Turkish citizens in the UK. This presentation examines the changing options available to Turkish citizen migrants in the UK within the broader EU context. In so doing, it discusses some recent decisions of the ECJ and analyses their importance in light of the UK's immigration rules and immigration trends from Turkey to the UK. These developments are placed within a conceptual scheme which views the regulatory structure determining the legal status of Turkish citizen migrants as an example of complex legal pluralism.
Biography:
Dr Prakash Shah specialises in religion and law, ethnic minorities and diasporas in law, immigration, refugee and nationality law, and comparative law with special reference to South Asians. He has published widely and lectured internationally in these fields (see cv). Dr Shah was Lecturer at SOAS, University of London from 1993, and Lecturer at the University of Kent at Canterbury from August 2000. He joined Queen Mary, University of London in 2002, where he is now a Senior Lecturer. Dr. Shah is currently participating in the RELIGARE project (http://www.religareproject.eu/), a three-year research project funded by the FP7 Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Programme of the Directorate-General for Research of the European Commission. RELIGARE explores increasing diversity of religions and other convictions that are transforming Europe into a new type of entity. The purposes of RELIGARE are to identify the normative frameworks, case-law, and policies best capable of holding together the countries’ diverse inhabitants in a democratic structure and an EU-wide zone of social peace, while maintaining respect for the rule of law and ensuring social justice for all. The RELIGARE project is also building an online database of case law from some participating European countries. For a podcast of the public lectures given at the last RELIGARE conference in June 2010 at Queen Mary, follow this link: http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/podcast/index.html#religare
Dr. Shah and Dr. Derya Bayir (a former doctoral student at Queen Mary) have just completed the fieldwork stage of a project investigating the Socio-legal Adaptation of British Immigrants in Turkey. The project is funded by the Nuffield Foundation and the British Institute in Ankara. Interviews with British and Turkish people were conducted in the Muğla region of Western Turkey, an area of significant British settlement, between May and August 2010. The first results will be presented by Dr. Shah and Dr. Bayir at the International Conference on Transnationalism and Migration (TRANSMIG) in Stockholm on November 4-5 (see http://www.ceifo.su.se/pub/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=5996&a=81630).