The purpose of the article is to analyse the migration corridor managed by the state authorities on the Balkan migration route in the second half of 2015, understand it from the perspective of the existing legal and institutional frameworks, and show that the corridor was a phenomenon outside of national and European positive law, while at the same time it responded to the requirements of international human rights principles. The corridor was a clear, intentional and coordinated deviation from legal provisions. It amounted to a state of exception, a certain level of state of emergency in which the rules adopted by the national and European legislatures were suspended and replaced by internal instructions or decrees, or even with constantly changing state practices. The analysis involved comparison of a positive normative framework with the actual procedures carried out by the state structures, and identification of discrepancies which were then qualitatively evaluated from the perspective of international standards. Another purpose of the article was to show that the corridor which was also sometimes referred to as a “humanitarian corridor”, only seemed humanitarian since in fact it served a completely different purpose, namely the interests of state authorities for the refugees and migrants to leave their territories as quickly as possible.
