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COVID-19 Certificates as a New Form of Mobility Control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2021

Jouni HÄKLI Open the ORCID record for Jouni HÄKLI [Opens in a new window]
Jouni HÄKLI*
Affiliation:
Professor of Regional Studies, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Finland; email: jouni.hakli@tuni.fi.
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Abstract

The global volume of travel has grown steadily for decades and hence the border closures and travel restrictions in response to COVID-19 have created an unforeseen impact on the number of international border crossings. In air traffic alone the data show a striking 75.6% decrease in the number of scheduled international passengers. We might hasten to think that the strict travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 crisis have in principle treated mobile populations equally – for once we have all been banned from travelling. We could even consider the recent initiatives to introduce “vaccination certificates” as a fair and democratic way to reintroduce safe international travelling. In reality, the idea of a COVID-19 certificate is but a new layer in the broader landscape of highly uneven global mobility where travellers’ citizenship and place of origin truly matter. This article discusses some of the major inequalities embedded in the global mobility regime and argues that the idea of the COVID-19 certificate as an equaliser remains completely disconnected from these underlying realities. To conclude, the article discusses problems related to uneven access to digital travel documents, such as the proposed COVID-19 certificate.

Type
Symposium on COVID-19 Certificates
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 12 , Special Issue 2: Symposium on COVID-19 Certificates and Special Issue on the Global Governance of Alcohol , June 2021 , pp. 362 - 369
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the editors Luiza Bialasiewicz and Cliff Wirajendi, the anonymous referees and members of the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) at Tampere University for their helpful comments and suggestions.

References

1 R Koslowski, “The international travel regime” in R Koslowski (ed.), Global Mobility Regimes (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2011) pp 51–72.

2 IATA, “Industry Statistics Fact Sheet” <https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/pressroom/fact-sheets/industry-statistics/>.

3 IATA, “2020 worst year in history for air travel demand” <https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/pr/2021-02-03-02/>.

4 E Cohen, “Mobility regimes, subversive mobilities, and tourism” (2021) 26(1) Tourism Analysis 91.

5 One illuminative assessment of the power of travel documents is the Henley Passport Index, which ranks passports according to the number of countries their holders can travel to without a prior visa; see “The Henley Passport Index” <https://www.henleypassportindex.com/passport>.

6 European Commission, ”Communication from the Commission – a common path to safe and sustained re-opening” <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A52021DC0129>.

7 Parts of this section are modified from text previously published in J Häkli, “The border in the pocket: the passport as a boundary object” in A-L Amilhat Szary and F Giraut (eds), Borderities and the politics of contemporary mobile borders (London, Palgrave Macmillan 2015) pp 85–99.

8 T Cresswell, “Towards a politics of mobility” (2010) 28(1) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17.

9 O Löfgren, “Crossing borders: the nationalization of anxiety” (1999) 29 Ethnologia Scandinavica 5.

10 J Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2000).

11 These motivations and concerns are explicit in a resolution adopted five year later; see League of Nations, “Resolution adopted by the Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets in Paris on October 21st, 1920” <https://biblio-archive.unog.ch/Dateien/CouncilMSD/C-641-M-230-1925-VIII_EN.pdf>.

12 M Salter, Rights of Passage. The Passport in International Relations (London, Lynner Rienner Publishers 2003).

13 D Lyon (ed.), Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Automated Discrimination (London, Routledge 2002).

14 The model passport described in Annex 1 of the conference resolution specified the content and layout of the passport with details including number of pages, physical structure and size, materials, languages and personal details; see League of Nations, supra, note 11.

15 Löfgren, supra, note 9.

16 ibid.

17 Torpey, supra, note 10.

18 N Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press 1999).

19 Löfgren, supra, note 9.

20 P Adey, “Facing airport security: affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body” (2009) 27(2) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 274; B Muller, “Risking it all at the biometric border: mobility, limits, and the persistence of securitisation” (2011) 16(1) Geopolitics 91.

21 M Romero, “Racial profiling and immigration law enforcement: rounding up of usual suspects in the Latino community” (2006) 32(2–3) Critical Sociology 447; M Salter, “When the exception becomes the rule: borders, sovereignty, and citizenship” (2008) 12(4) Citizenship Studies 365.

22 J Häkli, “Biometric identities” (2007) 31(2) Progress in Human Geography 1.

23 European Commission, ”COVID-19: Digital Green Certificates” <https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-response/safe-covid-19-vaccines-europeans/covid-19-digital-green-certificates_en>.

24 European Commission, supra, note 6.

25 ibid.

26 See also D Wilson, “Biometrics, borders and the ideal suspect” in S Pickering and L Weber (eds), Borders, mobility and technologies of control (Dordrecht, Springer 2006) pp 87–109.

27 For Global North/South inequalities, see, eg, M Hayes and R Pérez-Gañán, “North–South migrations and the asymmetric expulsions of late capitalism: global inequality, arbitrage, and new dynamics of North–South transnationalism” (2017) 5(1) Migration Studies 116.

28 European Commission, supra, note 6.

29 B Ajana, “Biometric citizenship” (2012) 16(7) Citizenship Studies 851; P Metcalfe and L Dencik, “The politics of big borders: data (in)justice and the governance of refugees” (2019) 24(4) First Monday doi: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i4.9934.

30 Eg, P Schlagenhauf, D Patel, A Rodriguez-Morales, P Gautret, MP Grobusch and K Leder, “Variants, vaccines and vaccination passports: challenges and chances for travel medicine in 2021” (2021) 40 Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease 40.

31 K Mossberger, “Toward digital citizenship. Addressing inequality in the information age” in A Chadwick and P N Howard (eds), Routledge handbook of Internet politics (Abingdon, Routledge 2009) pp 173–85.