The Human Right to Leave: But Whereto?

Abstract: While all persons — with a few exceptions — are allowed to leave any country regardless of nationality, not all persons are allowed to enter any country of their choosing; and only citizens enjoy, in principle, the right to enter their country of nationality, which most often, and by necessity, is a restricted number of countries, since some of them prohibit multiple nationality. One claim that is frequently made in contemporary migration-related literature, and that much migration-related philosophical debate presupposes in one way or another, yet remains unexplored, is the claim that the right to leave a state – enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 – does not entail a right to enter another state. This claim is typically made in relation or conjunction with another (set of) claims: that this alleged state of affairs is wrong somehow, or vice versa, that it is not. This dissertation deals with both claims and offer a first systematic study of these. On the one hand, the aforementioned descriptive claim has caught the attention of many observers who have, for the most part, taken it as a fairly undisputed description of current international law. I defend the view I call descriptive legal symmetrism, according to which there already is a form of symmetry between entry and exit rights, albeit not the one that most scholars set out to look for. On the other hand, in the context of the normative set of claims made by some authors concerning whether this alleged state of affairs is either immoral or unlawful (or both) in that it would expose the migrant to moral injustice and a protection gap in the contemporary human rights regime (namely, that of having, after leaving a country, nowhere to go), I submit that the object of disagreement in the normative legal debate concerns whether or not we ought to use the law to enforce what I call ‘Proposition A’: ‘it is permitted that any person leaves any country (besides justified exceptions), therefore it is obligatory that all states permit entry (besides justified exceptions)’. I conclude that much of the debate focuses on matters that, albeit interesting in their own right, might not be what is at stake. I hope to contribute to the normative discussion by sorting out the different positions, illustrating their truth-making conditions, and stressing where a position depends on problematic assumptions.