Returning Foreign Fighters: Responses, Legal Challenges and Ways Forward

This book, a follow-up publication to the 2016 volume Foreign Fighters under International Law and Beyond, zooms in on the responses that the international community and individual States are implementing in response to (prospective and actual) returning foreign fighters (FFs) and their families, focusing on returnees from Syria and Iraq to European countries. 

As States and international organisations are still ‘learning by doing’, the role of the academic community is to help steer the process by bridging the divide between international standards and their implementation at the national level and between security concerns and human rights law. Furthermore, the academic community can and should assist in identifying ways forward that are both effective, sustainable and international law-compliant. Those are, ultimately, the goals that the present volume seeks to pursue. 

The observations, recommendations and warnings included in this book will be useful in future debates on (returning) FFs, both in the academic world and in the world of policy makers and practitioners, as well as to the public at large.

Francesca Capone is Associate Professor of International Law at the Istituto DIRPOLIS of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy.

Christophe Paulussen is Senior Researcher International Law at the T.M.C. Asser Instituut in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is Lecturer in International Law at the Manchester International Law Centre, University of Manchester, School of Law in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Part I: Setting the Scene.- Chapter 2. Europe and Its Returning Foreign Fighters: Overview of the Policy Response.- Chapter 3. Historical Responses to Foreign Fighters and Returnees.- Chapter 4. The Status of Foreign Fighters’ Family Members under Counter-Terrorism Law and International Humanitarian Law: Overcoming the Victims/Perpetrators Dichotomy?.- Part II: Responses to the (Returning) Foreign Fighters Phenomenon: The International Dimension.- Chapter 5. The International Legal and Policy Framework on Returning Foreign Fighters: Focus on the United Nations and the Global Counterterrorism Forum.- Chapter 6. ‘Foreign Fighters’, Syrian Camps and the Jurisdictional Quagmire.- Part III: Responses to the (Returning) Foreign Fighters Phenomenon: The National Criminal Law Dimension.- Chapter 7. Evidentiary and Charging Matters in the Context of Prosecuting Returning Foreign Fighters before National Courts.- Chapter 8. The Qualification of the Activities of (Returned) Foreign Fighters under National Criminal Law.- Chapter 9. The Lack of Individualisation of Sentences and their Enforcement at the Expense of Reintegration in France.- Chapter 10. Putting the ‘Foreign’ in ‘Foreign Fighter’: Nationality Deprivation and the Denial of Readmission.- Chapter 11. Family Courts as Part of States’ Counter-Terrorism Toolkit: A Welcome Development for the Children of FTFs?.- Chapter 12. Legal Regulation of Subversive Expressions in Relation to Terrorist Travel: The Dutch Situation against the Backdrop of International Human Rights Law.

Christophe Paulussen is Senior Researcher International Law at the T.M.C. Asser Instituut in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is Lecturer in International Law at the Manchester International Law Centre, University of Manchester, School of Law in Manchester, United Kingdom.