The Right to Seek Asylum at the Face of Confluence between Informal Externalisation Agreements and COVID-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 Pandemic and swift closure of international borders has placed the right to seek asylum in a precarious position. The paper questions the impact of COVID-19 on the right to seek asylum at the face of the informal externalisation agreements (IEA) concluded by the European Union (EU) Border States to shift border management to neighbouring transit states. The paper argues that IEA have made the right to seek asylum obsolete well before the Pandemic outbreak. The paper further argues that the Pandemic’s impact on the right to seek asylum is temporal and defusable through enhanced procedural measures. However, in the long run, the Pandemic will boost informal externalisation to transit states. Thereby, along with IEA, the Pandemic will become highly detrimental to the right to seek asylum because it provides an alibi to the Border States to expel asylum seekers arriving at their borders.