The legal border: violence, discretion and pluralism of the Menton-Ventimiglia border

• Since 2015, migrant rights violations became normalised at the border. • States exploit ambiguity across normative implementation and plural frameworks. • Discretion lets actors interpret and implement law according to their goal. • Legal ambiguity enables States to bypass human rights obligations at the border. • Activists expose legal gaps and challenge violations, shaping border practices. The state of emergency declared in France in 2015, followed by the reintroduction of border controls at the Franco-Italian border, has resulted in systematic violations of migrants’ rights in border regions. These violations conflict with international and EU law. As in other parts of EUrope, activists and legal practitioners operating in the Menton-Ventimiglia area have documented these practices and pursued strategic litigation to challenge the routinised practices of border authorities. This article examines how these legal challenges have affected the discretion and the practices of institutional actors and border authorities in interpreting and applying the law. Drawing on insights from legal geography scholarship and the framework of legal pluralism, the article highlights how the gaps between legal norms and their implementation on the ground intersect with the plural legal structures of the EU, further multiplying the possibilities of regulatory ambiguity. The analysis is based on the reconstruction of three legal cases connected to border violations, using court documents, reports from NGOs, and fieldwork conducted between Ventimiglia and Menton in the summer of 2024. The article contributes to debates on the relationship between law and borders by foregrounding the spatial and plural dimensions through which border policing and violations are structured and contested. While the State navigates legal ambiguities in order to implement an exclusionary border regime, legal practitioners can also rely on supranational structures to challenge the everyday management of the border.