Suchergebnisse

The CJEU has pending before it a crucial case on the criminalisation of seeking asylum and assistance to those seeking protection. At this critical juncture, this blog post highlights a sample of important decisions in which courts, giving effect to constitutional and international legal principles, set legal limits on this form of criminalisation. These cases reflect not only the appropriate legal limits, but also acknowledge the character of irregular migration and smuggling. Rather than framing individuals as dangerous illegal migrants and exploitative smugglers, they reassert the humanity of both those in search of refuge and opportunity, and those that assist them.

A critical discussion of EU and ECHR migration and refugee law, this book analyses the law on asylum and immigration of third country-nationals. It focuses on how the EU norms interact with ECHR human rights case law on migration, and the pitfalls of European human rights pluralism.

The implementation practices of ‹who is a refugee› vary widely in their approaches and outcomes. Scholarship in legal anthropology, sociolegal studies and comparative political science aims to understand and to explain the different (and often inconsistent) outcomes of when individuals seek asylum. In this forum article, I provide an overview of this scholarship, critically reflecting its benefits and limitations. The multidisciplinary research on refugee status determination shows that outcomes depend heavily on extraneous political factors, institutional design, and the personal predispositions of individual decision-makers. It is, however, often limited to European asylum systems, with a strong focus on decision makers' discretion. In light of these limitations of the existing scholarship, the article concludes with a brief overview of the RefMig project's research, which has aimed to offer a more global view of practices.