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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Who killed Blessing at the French-Italian border? Framing responsabilities through the Legal Geography approach

Résumé

On 9 May 2018, the body of Blessing Matthew, originally from Nigeria, was discovered in the Durance River, in the French Hautes-Alpes near the border with Italy. The Gap court opened an investigation but eventually dismissed the case on February 2021 without shedding any light on the circumstances of her death or determining any responsibility for it. I took part in the consortium, led by the agency Border Forensics, that conducted a counter-investigation whose aim was to reconstruct the events leading up to Blessing's death. Our analysis indicates that Blessing’s death is not an isolated event, but the result of a conjuncture of political decisions and police practices that endanger migrants in their crossing of the Alpine borders. The paper proposes to analyse the events that occurred in 2018 and the results of the counter-investigation by framing them within the Legal Geography approach and at the intersection of the Migration and the Border Studies. The tangle of laws, regulations and practices will be analysed at different levels to inscribe Blessing's within the migration and border regime and and thus overcome the rhetoric of fatality and the discourse attributing the young woman's death to the dangerousness of the mountain environment. To unravel the long chain of responsibilities, I propose to analyze not only the general legal framework (international and national), but also the mission order that the gendarmes who arrested Blessing and the two other fugitives in May 2018 received from their superiors, in order to highlight the discrepancy between orders and practices. This last legislative aspect, locally embedded and dependent on the topography of the site, is less discussed in the literature which generally focuses on the (supra-)national context to explain border deaths.

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Géographie
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Dates et versions

hal-04610839 , version 1 (13-06-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04610839 , version 1

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Cristina del Biaggio. Who killed Blessing at the French-Italian border? Framing responsabilities through the Legal Geography approach. First Annual Conference of Critical Legal Geography, Inter-university Department of Regional & Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Turin, Feb 2024, Turin, Italy. ⟨hal-04610839⟩
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