Week Five
Every time I think it is going to be a slow week here at the CEELI Institute, I am immediately proven wrong. I began the week without much on the calendar, but I was pulled into several exciting projects and meetings, and I am grateful that while we have had record highs in temperature here in Prague, there have been interesting conversations, research, and work to distract me from the sweltering heat.
Monday began with some unexpected last-minute research for a paper some of my colleagues were finalizing. I am learning about the nuances of EU law over the course of this summer, and for this assignment, I had to go through several directives the EU has issued to Member States on various areas of marital law. The directives were basically all covering jurisdiction, choice of law, and application of law from one Member State to another. I felt like I was right back in my Civil Procedure class, except, of course, that it applied to Europe and not the US. My task was in teasing out the differences between each directive, which essentially came down to what area of marital law they covered, including parental custody, marital property, and divorce or legal separation. I also had to determine when the directives referred to one another, or essentially whether there were cases where one procedure for determining jurisdiction held sway over another and under what circumstances. This task may sound tedious, but it was important for determining whether my colleagues had correctly described jurisdiction in marital law and how they would structure a future training they would prepare for lawyers.
With this task completed and the paper finalized, I then joined a meeting of representatives from organizations across Europe who work with human rights defenders, primarily in Eastern European countries. Our goal in convening was to discuss the major challenges that human rights defenders are facing across Europe in navigating the visa system when leaving their home countries for short terms stays or respites in other parts of Europe. The visa system and the laws surrounding movement for activists is perhaps not the most scintillating topic, but it opened up a discussion that touched on some major themes in EU politics and law.
I had several major takeaways from these meetings, a few of which I will highlight here. First, the narratives governments use about those who cross borders are tinged with fear, even when applied to human rights defenders. It seems that even this population, one that arguably does important work and is committed to returning to their home countries to continue that work, is subject to rhetoric about how they might flood borders and never leave the countries they enter, or become a drain on host countries. Even if they are applying for short term visas, they can face quite burdensome processes of proving residence, a certain level of income or savings, the purpose of their visit, and established connections to NGOs or other organizations in host countries. Given the circumstances many human rights defenders face and how quickly things can change on the ground for them, these processes can often become harmful or place them at risk.
The time delays and potential obstructions in obtaining the visa are only one source of challenge. The other major takeaway from the meetings was that these human rights defenders, some of whom are already under scrutiny from their home governments, are subject to extensive surveillance and breach of privacy when they apply for these visas. There is always a risk, of course, when submitting papers that include months' worth of financial records, addresses for where individuals live and will travel, names of contacts, passports, and many other pieces of information, including biodata such as fingerprints. But this risk greatly increases from the Visa Centers, private entities that the consulates use to process the information, and the introduction of technology, scrutiny of social media, and even the use of AI as a mechanism for reviewing visa applications. This topic alone is probably worth much more scrutiny, and it became apparent in our discussion that while the EU has been vocal about the encroachment on privacy of its citizens by tech companies, it has nothing to say in the visa code about the risk of privacy breaches in this particular process.
And my final takeaway involved a theme that comes up continually in the law: marrying principle with practice. The EU law expert who spoke to the group, a professor of law at the University of East London, noted repeatedly that the EU has professed to valuing the role of human rights defenders, to protecting them, and to valuing freedom of movement across Member States. Yet, there is nothing in EU policy that addresses the particular dangers and vulnerabilities that human rights defenders face when crossing borders. In fact, its policies may subject human rights defenders to more difficulties than World Cup fans, for example, applying to travel to watch the games. This discrepancy between principle and practice is a divide that this group is attempting to bridge, as they see the human rights defenders they support and know in need of additional legal mechanisms. The bilateral relationships between Member States, or the particular entrenched immigration practices of individual consulates and embassies often determine how visa processes work, rather than the stated principles and values of the region. The question the group asked, repeatedly, was what levers they can pull to make even small changes that can influence the region as opposed to fighting fire after fire with individual states and even consulate officials. All in all, they identified many levers--some at the level of the NGOs themselves, some at the level of the European Council or the European Parliament's Visa Council, and some at the level of Ministries of Foreign Affairs. It will be interesting to see how this work continues to unfold and whether there is change in the coming years in this area.
Finally, on a subject other than work, I had quite an adventure this week, through the bowels of the Czech post office bureaucracy. As a lovely gesture, a family member sent me a package a couple weeks ago, without knowing that it would be quite an involved process for the package to actually get to me when going through the Czech postal system. After receiving a form from the Customs Office, entirely in Czech, telling me I had a package and giving me several different options for how to prove that my package's contents could clear Customs, I went through a few rounds of attempts to decipher these options, using Google Translate, as well as a couple emails with the email address provided on the forms. It finally occurred to me that I would not get anywhere electronically and the only way I would be able to release my package from Customs would be to go to the post office myself. This decision was only the beginning. Going to the post office meant getting up at 5 in the morning to leave by 6 am, since the post office where my package was located was on the other side of Prague and opened at 8 am; to make it to work on time, I needed to arrive right at 8 to be first in line, get my package, and leave immediately to travel back across town. And while I can manage transportation systems here, I've learned the hard way that you cannot always rely on Ubers to show up immediately or trams to run exactly as you predict.
I managed to arrive on time, at the correct location, with a few minutes to spare, at a large, nondescript building located in what seemed to be a very residential neighborhood on the edge of the city. And the rest of the story isn't that exciting, except that it was somewhat a comedy of errors of me trying to communicate via the forms I had been sent, with the postal workers. They sent me to about five different offices on different floors of the building, told me to sign more forms, show my passport, pay a few fees, and then finally surrendered my package, handed to me by a man in an apron who gave me a warm smile. In the course of events, I had no idea what I was signing or what was happening, but I sat when I was told to sit, stood when I was told to stand, and nodded along as the helpful men and women walked me through the process.
Actually, in writing this anecdote, I realize that for me, the whole experience was somewhat funny, even entertaining, as I knew nothing bad would happen, and I would eventually walk away with my box. Frankly, even if I didn't get my box, everything would still be just fine. These kinds of encounters are normal, of course, run-of-the-mill interactions in the process of travel and navigating other languages, cultures, governments, even postal systems. But for some, particularly for those human rights defenders whose stories I spent the last two days hearing, the experience of crossing borders, securing required documents, showing passports, bank statements, and invitation letters, particularly in countries where they do not speak the language and where one bad interaction with a consulate official can elicit a denial, is harrowing and even life threatening. My one day at the post office was only one minor version of this story, but it was notable for the ways it can quickly become consequential in a different set of circumstances.