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Abstract
Two controversial rulings of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) deserve global attention, since they declined to scrutinize on human rights grounds the prevalent move towards enhanced border controls and externalization practices that define European asylum law and policy at this juncture. In ND and NT, judges deemed the Spanish policy of 'hot returns', without access to basic procedural guarantees, of those climbing border fences to be compatible with human rights. A few weeks later, the Grand Chamber thwarted enduring hopes for judicial innovation in MN when it reasserted a 'primarily territorial' understanding of State jurisdiction and declared inadmissible the claim of a Syrian family from the war-torn town of Aleppo to a humanitarian visa. While the decision on humanitarian visas means that 'non-arrival' policies cannot usually be challenged, critical inspection of the ND and NT judgment displays a confounding combination of restrictive arguments and dynamic elements beneath the surface of a seemingly clear-cut outcome. This lack of judicial precision, which was bound to cause heated debate about the practical implications of the judgment, reflects the basic tension between the prohibition of refoulement and the absence of a right to asylum in classic accounts of international refugee law. It will be argued that the judicial vindication of the Spanish 'hot returns' policy does not call into question non-refoulement obligations; it aims at identifying graded procedural standards for different categories of refugees and migrants. By contrast, the novel insistence on the abstract availability of legal channels of entry presents itself as a humanitarian fig leaf for the acceptance of strict control practices. At an intermediate level of abstraction, the two rulings mark a watershed moment, indicating the provisional endpoint of an impressive period of interpretative dynamism on the part of the ECtHR, which has played a critical role in the progressive evolution of international refugee and human rights law over the past three decades. Experts in asylum law who have become accustomed to supranational courts advancing the position of individuals will benefit from the insights of constitutional theory and the social sciences to rationalize why the former vigour has given way to a period of hesitation and potential standstill, at least in Europe. This analysis employs the perspective of strategic litigation to discuss contextual factors hindering the continued dynamism of human rights jurisprudence in Europe at this juncture.

While the technical details of immigration and asylum legislation remain the domain of a comparatively narrow field of experts, debates about nationality law often cause widespread attention within domestic academic circles. The latest reform was a case in point: in 2019, the government proposed depriving terrorist fighters of German nationality (provided that they have another passport) and suggested prohibiting the naturalisation of those with several spouses, thereby triggering a heated debate among experts. This contribution sets off to embed the legal-doctrinal analysis into a broader reflection on the role of nationality law as a forum for and vehicle of broader societal debates about the collective identity of Germans in the early 21st century. The article scrutinises this double function from an interdisciplinary perspective and shows that it is entrenched in the history of German nationality law with the extensive reform of 1999 as its climax. By contrast, the latest changes do not bring about a major conceptual or practical shift, since they continue earlier developments. Depriving terrorist fighters of the German passport adapts an established ground for the loss of nationality of those serving in foreign armies to the international context of asymmetric warfare; blocking the naturalisation of foreigners with several spouses reacts to a court judgment and complements several other small reform measures that have reinforced the integration paradigm within German nationality law over the past two decades. Against this background, the time may have come to disentangle nationality law from broader debates about collective identity at a time when many former immigrants have a German passport anyway. Such reconstruction of the national self-image beyond naturalisation may be addressed analytically from the standpoint of the citizenship paradigm, which remains normatively contested, but transcends technical focus of immigration, asylum and nationality legislation.