Removals of ‘Dangerous’ Mobile EU Citizens: Public Order and Security as a Police Paradigm

Abstract

Despite being frequently invoked in everyday police work and immigration enforcement to justify coercive measures, public order and security remains an ambiguous legal concept. For EU citizens, the Citizens’ Rights Directive stipulates public order and security grounds to provide a higher threshold against removals than criminal convictions alone. However, the removal grounds for EU citizens were founded on even less than criminal convictions in analysis of 100 removal orders for mobile Estonian and Romanian citizens in Finland. Ultimately, the removal orders relied on the assumption of future crimes and invoked a conception of ‘dangerous individuals’ with criminal tendencies, even based on single minor offences and administrative penal orders without criminal convictions. Notwithstanding various legal meanings, I argue that the required public order and security grounds for the removal of EU citizens corresponded to police conceptions of mobile populations as a potential source of criminality and a threat to social order.