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Earlier this year three Dutch NGOs sued the Netherlands for approving and carrying out the EU-Turkey deal. They argue that the Dutch government should be held responsible for the dire conditions under which asylum seekers have been held under on Greek islands since the deal has been concluded, which have repeatedly been found to violate human rights. In this blog, I sketch the context of litigation surrounding the EU-Turkey deal which has driven the NGOs to sue in the Dutch national legal system and explain the promise and pitfalls of the rise of strategic litigation in the sphere of migration and asylum law.

AbstractIncreasingly, collective actors in Europe, such as in the Netherlands and Italy, turn to litigation as the preferred strategy to attain their goals. Both at the national level and at the European level, civil society organisations (CSOs) are active in high‐profile cases, for example, in the field of asylum law. These CSOs operate in a different national political and legal system but do have similar European‐level opportunities. However, the extent to which European Union (EU) law is mobilised differs per CSO. This begs the following key question: Why do some CSOs mobilise EU law more frequently than others? Using empirical data, this article attempts to uncover what factors are relevant for four CSOs from Italy and the Netherlands whether to mobilise EU law or not. Most importantly, the article concludes that the framing of EU legal opportunities by the CSOs is considered to be relevant in (non‐)mobilisation of EU law.