The Ban on Collective Expulsions and the Betrayal of the Union’s Legal System at its External Borders

The paper looks into the current state of health of the European Union's legal order, using as a litmus test the functioning of the system of judicial protection in a specific area of the area of freedom, security and justice: the control of the Union's external borders. In this perspective, the paper explores why the prohibition of collective expulsions enunciated in Article 19 § 1 of the Charter does not seem to play any role in the case law of the Court of Justice, despite the increasingly worrying practice of informal pushbacks by Member States and the consequent development of significant case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the corresponding prohibition in Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 to the European Convention. Through the analysis of those phenomena, the study highlights a heavy contradiction of the fundamental equations on which the Union's order is or ought to be based, finally suggesting some possible reform