Faculty of law blogs / UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

‘Nothing to see here’? Criminalisation, solidarity, and visibility at the Belgian-French border

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Mathilde du Jardin
Ismail Oubad
Daniela Trucco

Guest post by Mathilde du Jardin, Ismail Oubad and Daniela Trucco. Mathilde du Jardin is a PhD candidate in Criminology at ULB. Her thesis is questioning the humanitarian boundaries in the light of migration policies and the European border regime, focusing on Belgium. She is also a member of Move coalition and visits centres fermés (detention centres) to provide sociolegal support. Ismail Oubad is a doctoral researcher within the ERC SolRoutes project, which explores solidarities along migration routes across Europe and beyond. His ethnographic work examines the implication of various dwelling spaces for bordercrossing along the Belgian-French route to the UK. Active within solidarity networks, he critically engages with subversive migration infrastructures and bordering practices through the lenses of the autonomy of migration and decolonial thought.  Daniela Trucco is an FRS-FNRS postdoctoral researcher in law and social movements at the Centre for Public and Social Law of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her current research aims to better understand the diversity of actions and attitudes towards migration in border areas, focusing on legal mobilisation and legal consciousness, and comparing two specific case studies: the southern French-Italian border and the northern French-Belgian border. 

 

The criminalisation of “unauthorised migration” and solidarity in Europe is in full swing and widely denounced by both civil society organisations and scholars. Often overlooked because of its presumed sanctuary policies and its narrative of being a sanctuary country, the Belgian case is another key example of this worrying trend. In this post, we transcend our distinct fieldworks and disciplinary standpoints to drive attention to the fact that Belgium is far from being immune to policing and bordering practices dis-authorising migrants and civil society actors.  

On the legal ground: a strong yet fuzzy humanitarian clause  

The targeting of migrant solitary in Belgium seems puzzling given the country’s existing laws. Article 77 of the consolidated law of 15 December 1980  includes a “humanitarian exception” when someone commits offences related to assisting with irregular entry, transit, or stay, as long as such assistance is provided for "mainly humanitarian reasons”. Moreover, while the 2002 EU Directive makes a distinction between the criminalisation of facilitating irregular mobility (entry and transit) and of irregular stay, the Belgian humanitarian exception covers all three offences. Because of this broad exception, the legal framework has long been regarded as more protective compared to legislation in countries like France. Therefore, criminal policies’ objectives should focus only on “smugglers” and “human traffickers”, and so should protect people acting for solidarity - primarily for humanitarian reasons - from being prosecuted.  

Between 2018 and 2021 however this assumption changed after a trial, renamed procès de la solidarité, involving eight “migrants in transit” charged with human smuggling (Article 77bis) and four others for providing essential and/or necessary assistance to the smuggling activities. Actions such as lending a phone and a computer, which were deemed helpful to the activities of smugglers, as well as searching for the location of a parking lot and translating the label on a truck to identify its destination to the UK, were being questioned. Eventually the helpers were acquitted on the grounds that they did not participate knowingly and voluntarily in the organisation of smuggling. However, the outcome of the trial did not rule out the possibility of condemning helpers who knowingly provide useful assistance in organising the illegal crossing of borders, even for primarily humanitarian reasons, because of the combined effects of article 77 and article 77bis. Indeed, the latter does not provide any humanitarian exception. Consequently, the room of interpretation in the existing legal framework has been used to intimidate migrants’ supporters and to prosecute migrants themselves as smugglers when they take part in organising their own border crossings. 

a series of men are standing behind a fence next to a white van, all looking towards the forest
People on the move arrested after encampment dismantlement, Froyennes, Belgium © Notélé.be (free to reuse with permission)

At the political level: the federal countering of ‘transit migration’ and the local efforts for sanctuary  
 
Understanding the politicization of migrant solidarity requires situating it within the EU-wide 'transit migration framework' pressuring so-called transit states to tighten control. In 2004, the Touquet Agreement between France and the UK was extended to Belgium, allowing British police to operate in Belgian Eurostar railway stations. Post-Brexit, the UK has sought a bilateral agreement enabling direct pushbacks to Belgium. Policing transit migration has increasingly merged with anti-smuggling efforts. A 2015 Belgian plan defined smuggling as profit-driven facilitation of entry or stay; by 2021, this expanded to include paid services like information, housing, and transport. In May 2024, Belgium approved Frontex deployment in transport hubs to bolster controls and expulsions. Besides, since 2015, the political goal of policing transit migration also materialised through the governative use of the denigrative term of transmigrants for people on the move, which has no legal grounds but strengthens the idea of their illegitimate presence on the territory.  

In response to Belgium’s restrictive federal migration policies, many cities and municipalities took action to create sanctuary spaces for illegalised migrants. Cities like Liège and Brussels emerged as contested terrains where the protections of sans-papiers (a term for undocumented migrants) was negotiated and experimented. Examples include municipal motions for requisitioning empty buildings to house undocumented migrants and homeless locals, citizen-led accommodation initiatives in many metropolitan and border cities, mobilisations against detention centres, and the occupation of vacant buildings to demand regularisation. A key dimension of these sanctuary efforts was the attempt to provide protection and reception at a time when the State actively denied such support to "unauthorised" migrants.  

On the field: diffused and discreet bordering practices  

On the ground, two elements emerge. First, notwithstanding the legal framework and the sanctuary initiatives, people on the move and supportive civil society are increasingly criminalised. Second, policing transit migration unfolds at the local level and within a large territory, thus contributing to the poor visibility of the border.  

While cities or municipalities symbolically commit to sanctuary, they often tolerate or directly implement federal directives—such as allowing ID checks where the undocumented live and work, as well as in public spaces or transports, dismantling of makeshift shelters and squats. This diffuse border functioning helps explain why the Franco-Belgian border, despite being a key migratory route, has drawn less media and scholarly attention than border zones like Ventimiglia, Calais, Melilla, or the Greek islands. As Cuttitta showed through the example of Lampedusa, a border is never the result of nature, it emerges out of precise political acts increasing (or decreasing) the level of ‘borderity’ of a place. Accordingly, while the Belgian-French border has been made less visible, the effective borders impacting migrants have shifted to the local level across Belgium. For instance, migration control unfolds through camps evictions and vehicle checks at motorway service area linking Aschaffenburg, Germany to Dunkirk, France, rather than systematic border checks of all entry and exit points from one national territory to another. The Franco-Belgian border is thus materialised by roads, crossing points and waiting areas for migrants. Police practices tend to discourage both migrants and helpers to settle in informal camps or create durable safer spaces: a policy baptised ‘zéro points de fixation’ (zero fixation points) on the example of the French one applied at Calais. From Liège to Brussels, cities themselves become extensions of the border. Through police checks, blocked access to shelters, selective humanitarian aid, informality, and forced (im)mobilities, migrants face ongoing bordering. 

Belgium is therefore not immune to policing migrants and their helpers. The current government, appointed in February 2025, can be expected to entrench these processes with significant effects on the lives of both citizens and foreigners. Immediately after being appointed, the prime minister  announced the intention of avoiding all possible ‘magnet effects’ for asylum seekers and ‘transmigrants’, and the Minister for Asylum and Migration proposed a series of measures to this effect, including the possibility of searching the houses of hosting citizens and increasing the capacity of detention centres.  
 
 
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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

M. Jardin, I. Oubad and D. Trucco. (2025) ‘Nothing to see here’? Criminalisation, solidarity, and visibility at the Belgian-French border . Available at:https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/border-criminologies-blog/blog-post/2025/06/nothing-see-here-criminalisation-solidarity-and. Accessed on: 19/07/2025

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