 Good morning and thank you. And good morning from what is a very sunny Oxford morning. Say thank you for giving up your time for joining us this morning. It's a pleasure for us to come together and speak to each other and also to be able to interact with you. So we appreciate your time. The paper I'm presenting this morning examines the potential of due diligence to hold states responsible for violence but also indifference to violence that occurs in the context of European migration control. And I conduct that examination in three stages. The first of these argues that one of the distinguishing features of violence, including fatal violence, which is experienced by those who travel to, across and from the Mediterranean, is the role that law plays in enabling it, both the violence and indifference to it. And the arguments I advance here may be familiar, but I think they're worth restating. Journeys to and within Europe are not dangerous per se. They are dangerous because they are illegalized. Now legalization involves the closing, reduction or restriction of legal migration pathways. Coupled with the imposition of a myriad of legal and physical barriers, which prevent and deter people from traveling to and sometimes within the European Union. Illegalized journeys are violent and dangerous journeys. To take just one example, the problem is not that states have failed to set and enforce safety standards on, for example, the construction and use of passenger ships. The problem is that people who undertake illegalized journeys are prohibited or deterred from using the ships, planes or coaches to which those standards pertain, and have instead to use the dinghies, the lorries and the vans to which such standards do not. The consequences of this for those involved include death at sea or elsewhere, but also violence from those who facilitate migration, those who detect, intercept and punish it, and those who, like the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, engage in all three of these activities, sometimes simultaneously. Law has not only created and contributed to the circumstances in which those who undertake illegalized journeys are exposed to violence. It also shows shapes how such violence is responded to. And in the paper, I use the term Mediterranean death fatigue to explore both European and my own responses to death in and around the Mediterranean Sea. And in doing so, I draw on the work of Tugba Basra, who writes on, amongst other things, how law sanctions rescue and how Mediterranean death fatigue is a collective indifference that is generated by law. Having established the nature of the challenge in punity and indifference to violence that occurs in the context of migration control, the rest of the paper evaluates the role that due diligence obligations can play in responding to it. So I first chart the inception of due diligence obligations from the inter-American system and the case of Velazquez-Hodorus, which of course involved in false disappearances so relevant to the previous presentation. And I chart that development up into the Istanbul Convention, which is a European Convention on Violence and Discrimination Against Women. And whilst I don't have time now to discuss the nature of due diligence obligations in any meaningful detail, there are two types of obligation that I just wanted to highlight briefly. The first is that there are two levels of due diligence obligation. Those of a structural or systemic nature and the obligations that are owed to specific individuals or specific groups of individuals. In relation to the former category, states are required to put in place laws, processes, and policies which address the root cause of rights violations to prevent and deter them, and even when they do occur, to identify perpetrators, hold them to account and make appropriate reparation to victims. In addition to these structural or systemic obligations, states are also required to offer individual victims or potential victims effective measures of protection, punishment, and reparation. States are required to take preventative operational measures where they know or ought to know that a particular individual or a particular group of individuals face a real and immediate risk of harm. The third part of the paper reviews the potential of due diligence obligations to hold states who are factually responsible for violence that occurs in the context of migration control to be held legally so in certain circumstances. And there are two brief examples that I want to give of that potential now. The first relates to violence that occurs within a responsible state's territory. Illegalization may not just prevent someone from accessing a jurisdiction legally. It may deny them access to those migration statuses which are relatively advantageously placed within the hierarchy that immigration law creates. So your migration status is your mission to remain in a particular jurisdiction. And some migration statuses have particular benefits attached to it, like the ability to access state support if you're in difficulties, for example. Other migration statuses are very restrictive or disadvantageous. Some people have no migration status at all as a result of illegalization fairly obviously. And there's a wealth of empirical research which speaks to the fact that those who hold disadvantageous statuses or no status at all are at a particular and heightened risk of experiencing violence and exploitation. Chauvel Malali has argued that the nexus between safe migration routes due diligence in human rights standards has been rarely acknowledged by states. Now, whilst this is true, the European Court of Human Rights, however, has begun to explore this nexus. Starting with the case of Rantsev versus Cyprus in Russia and following through to Chaudry and others versus Greece, the court has used due diligence obligations to hold states responsible for unsafe migration routes and the unsafe migration statuses that such routes create. At the structural level, the court in Rantsev, for example, found that states immigration rules must address concerns relating to the encouragement, facilitation or tolerance of trafficking and other abuses. Migration statuses must offer practical and effective protection from violence and exploitation. Now, whilst cases like Rantsev or Chaudry do not require states to regularize and does not require states to provide safe migration routes, the court uses the due diligence obligation to hold states responsible for the unsafe routes that they do create and some facets of illegalization that expose migrants to the risk of violence and exploitation. The second example I want to give concerns violence that occurs outside the responsible state's territory and such violence is the hallmark in some ways of illegalization. In the case of the last two and others versus Moldova and Russia, the European Court of Human Rights relied extensively on due diligence obligations to hold Russia and Moldova responsible consecutively and concurrently for the applicants in that case is ill treatment and that entreatment involved solitary confinement and lawful detention and the threat of death. It was perpetrated by separatists who are under the effective control or the decisive influence of the armed forces of the Russian Federation in Transdanistra, a separatist revolution of Moldova. Like the separatists operating in Transdanistra, the Libyan Coast Guard would not exist without the combination of military, financial and political support that Italy and other EU states have provided it with. Such a decisive influence may, as it did in Iliasku, amount to an exercise of jurisdiction. And if this is the case, then Italy and other EU states who cooperate with the Libyan Coast Guard, like the Russian Federation in Iliasku, would be subject to all of the relevant primary rules of international law, but also the due diligence obligation to prevent abuses occurring. Now it took more than one rule to build Europe's migration control regime and indeed its success is predicated on its complexity. It will therefore take more than one obligation of conduct to dismantle it, but I hope that in this very short presentation I've given you examples of due diligence potential to challenge unsafe migration routes and to hold states responsible for the impacts of conduct that take place outside of their territory or jurisdiction. And I want to conclude by hypothesizing that discussing, determining and then rendering the diligence that is due to those who traveled to and within Europe may not just reduce violence, but also may reduce our indifference to that violence. To be diligent is to be careful, to be persistent, to be assiduous. Such conduct does not guarantee that migrants' lives will be the subject of meaningful concern, but it may help them to become so. Thank you.