Abstract
Although crime displacement has been extensively investigated, there is a relative dearth of studies on the displacement of transnational crime. Despite the scarcity of literature, it is nevertheless routinely argued in the public sphere that interventions aimed at curtailing crime in a given country may simply displace it somewhere else. In particular, human smuggling is believed to be rather fluid and responsive to changes in the situational landscape, such as renewed enforcement actions and normative changes. Whether this is the case or not remains an unsolved question. Hence, this study seeks to investigate displacement dynamics vis-à-vis the temporal and spatial discontinuity in the regulatory environment produced by Egyptian government’s introduction of Law 82/2016. Specifically, the study exploits geo-temporal data on missing migrants, as well as data on arrivals to Europe, in order to investigate the spatial and target displacement of human smuggling in the Mediterranean during the months following the introduction of Law 82/2016. The results indicate that although the introduction of Law 82/2016 produced almost no target displacement, it likely resulted in the spatial displacement of human smuggling routes, with a marked intensification—in relative terms—in the flows along the Central and Western Mediterranean routes. These results, although exploratory, nonetheless, support the hypothesis concerning the adaptability of human smuggling. In this respect, a better understanding of the dynamics underlying displacement of human smuggling would aid the designing of more coordinated criminal policies, with respect to both the safeguarding of human rights and enhancing the effectiveness of counter-smuggling efforts.
This work is the result of a joint effort between Gianluca A. Bertoni and Alberto Aziani. G.A.B. and A.A. jointly contributed to the theoretical framework of the work, developed the methodological approach and wrote the results and the discussion. G.A.B. cleaned and processed the raw data and conducted the analyses. Both authors reviewed the manuscript and approved the final version.
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Notes
- 1.
By spatial displacement, we mean the transnational relocation of human smuggling criminal activities, while target displacement pertains to the change of nationality of the smuggled migrants (see Guerette & Aziani, 2021 in this book for a discussion of the concept of displacement of transnational crimes).
- 2.
In 2015, Frontex registered almost two million irregular border crossings into Europe, which was six times higher than the numbers recorded in 2014 and three times greater than those recorded in 2016 (Frontex, 2020).
- 3.
The Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, adopted by General Assembly resolution 55/25 of 15 November 2000. The “Smuggling Protocol” entered into force on 28 January 2004 and defines “smuggling of migrants” as “the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident.”
- 4.
Available at: https://missingmigrants.iom.int/downloads.
- 5.
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is defined as a sea zone over which a sovereign state has special rights regarding the exploration, conservation and exploitation of natural resources. It stretches (at most) 200 nautical miles (nmi) from the baseline from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured.
- 6.
The necessity to focus on time frames of 10 months, instead of 1 year, was given by the data availability for the pre-intervention period.
- 7.
UNHCR data are available only on a monthly basis. Law 82/2016 entered into force on November 8, which posed a choice with respect to the attribution of the month to the pre- or post-intervention periods. The entire month of November was assigned to the post-intervention interval.
- 8.
Although arrivals to Cyprus are also available, they were discarded due to their limited time coverage, namely, the fact that the figures are only available from January 2017, which only covers the post-intervention period.
- 9.
A fishing boat bound for Italy, crammed with over 500 migrants, capsized near the Egyptian coast on September 21, 2016. Over 200 people are believed to have lost their lives. Following this event, the Egyptian parliament acted by issuing Law 82/2016, which was signed by President al-Sisi on November 7, 2016.
- 10.
Statistically significant changes were limited to the 1-year interval. This is most likely due to the low sample size of shorter periods, which limits the power of the t tests.
- 11.
Between 2010 and 2019, at least 9 barriers were erected between MENA countries, namely, Israel–Egypt, Libya–Egypt, Algeria–Morocco, Morocco-Algeria, Algeria–Libya, Tunisia–Libya, Turkey–Syria, Turkey–Iraq, Turkey–Iran (the first country of each pair is the one that actually built the barrier).
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Acknowledgements
A special thanks goes out to all the experts who participated in the meeting on the topics of displacement and convergence of transnational crimes organized by Transcrime and held in Milan on November 5 and 6, 2019. They contributed significantly to our research, namely, in terms of hel** us better frame and understand the issue of human smuggling in Egypt. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Bertoni, G.A., Aziani, A. (2022). Displacement of Human Smuggling: An Exploratory Analysis of the Effects of Law 82/2016 in Egypt. In: Savona, E.U., Guerette, R.T., Aziani, A. (eds) The Evolution of Illicit Flows. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95301-0_7
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