**Preface to "Rule of Law and Human Mobility in the Age of the Global Compacts"**

The pros outweigh the cons that glow from Beckett's bleak reductio and who would trade self-knowledge for a prelapsarian metaphor, love-play of the ironic conscience for a prescriptive innocence?

*Beyond Howth Head*, by Derek Mahon 1970

Almost five years after the two Global Compacts on migration and refugees were adopted, legal scholars are still pondering their effects for migrants, refugees, the sending, transit, and receiving countries, and, above all, their implications for international law. Starting out with the elephant in the room means to circle around this 'unidentifiable' international cooperation framework and to assess its law-like quality. This is especially true for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), for which many open questions remain: What kind of (legal) sources, what normative values, which aspirations were embedded in its 23 objectives, as well as its guiding principles and common understandings cementing its pieces together? What functions should practitioners and academics ascribe to the Compacts' soft legal quality: can these be—using the conceptual frame developed by Peters (2011)—gap-filling as '*para*-law', soft norms as forerunner to hard law ('*pre*-law') or, finally, a consolidation of regional and bilateral best practices, which pre-empt the emergence of prescriptive rules or else expand and diversify the scope and content of general principles of law or customary norms ('law-*plus*')? This list goes on for both Global Compacts: according to which criteria were the composites assembled, and do they provide international migration and refugee law with a coherent and actionable global institutional architecture?

In this book, which reprints the Special Issue The Rule of Law and Human Mobility in the Age of the Global Compacts: Relativising the Risks and Gains of Soft Normativity?, nine contributions dive into the pandemonium of the Global Compacts buzzing in our analytical universe, and the verses of Derek Mahon come to our minds. 'Self-knowledge', for us legal scholars, reveals our own projections about our legal traditions interacting with different epistemic communities and their visions over the Global Compacts. As a result, their legal characteristics are filtered through the perception of an academic community that clusters around pre-fixed normative conceptions, methodologies, approaches, and legal theories. As in Mahon's metaphor, the 'prescriptive innocence' of this methodological approach trades ironic conscience for familiar epistemic keys to decrypt and describe complexity. By this turn, it renounces to unlock that bulk of rules with a different key, one which is similar to a pen drawing the ink from evolving patterns in public international law.

Likewise, the ambition and intention of this edited volume are to relinquish for a while our pre-determined self-knowledge as legal scholars and envisage new epistemic keys switching from innocent 'relative normativity' (Weil 1983) to interdisciplinary analytical platforms, which could feed substance into the goal of 'making migration work [better] for all' (UN Secretary General 2017).

In line with the vision of a 'comprehensive approach to the Global Compacts', which is guiding this Special Issue, we decided to arrange the articles in a deductive order, starting out with those pieces of work discussing the Global Compacts on an international legal scale and from a global governance perspective, followed by those articles that analyze the impact of the Compacts on the external dimension of EU migration and asylum policies, with a third set of articles investigating specific issues of national migration law and policy for which the Compacts are setting standards for.

As co-editors of this Special Issue based in Bern, Rome, and Vienna, overcoming pandemic-induced physical distance through a shared vision and a steady common endeavor, we were not alone. Indeed, with the firm resolve to ascribe real meaning to the array of projects, practices, principles, and programs revolving around the Global Compacts, we reached out to authors from the United Kingdom, Bangladesh, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, and Sweden, directly and through an open call for papers, to lend us their ear and offer their enriching insights.

The result is this edited volume that hosts a collection of articles embracing and proposing new epistemic legal keys and cross-comparative perspectives, ranging from those of the European Union, selected EU and UN Member States, the Global South, NGOs, and legal theory. Within this collection, finding its center of gravity in the Global Compact for Migration, multiple insights, loopholes, and long-held beliefs are identified and challenged, with a view to delivering a thought-through map and a guidepost toward new multilateral (legal) solutions. Common to all articles is the contribution to rooting the rule of law, human rights, and due process more firmly into the regimes governing cross-border movement of persons, such that a precondition is laid for the human rights of all the people on the move to be enjoyed and protected, also at borders, during dangerous journeys, in transit and once admitted to a foreign soil.

We, as editors, strongly believe that the approach adopted challenges conventional knowledge on the two Global Compacts and conveys thought-provoking key messages to policy makers, reflective practitioners, and academics alike on the potential of the Global Compacts for rethinking the law and policy underpinning international migration and refugee governance. We do hope this edited volume will be of inspiration for everyone interested in unpacking the Global Compacts and the plethora of salient public international law issues—and beyond—that they raise.

#### **Marion Panizzon, Daniela Vitiello, and Tamas Molnar** *Editors*
