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Since 2015, more than 27.500 innocent people died or 'went missing' in the Mediterranean. They drowned by themselves thanks to villain smugglers, the Council submits; accountability for the death toll is a complex matter, the Court of Justice finds; besides the geopolitical times are complex – the Commission is right. But what an accident: mare nostrum, a great thoroughfare, turned itself into a racialized grave. Yet, these deaths at EU borders, just as mass abuse and kidnappings by EU-funded and equipped thugs in Libya do not happen by chance. The EU-Belarus border is another locus of torture and violence. All this is a successful implementation of well-designed lawless policies by the Union in collusion with the Member States. In this post, we map key legal techniques deployed by the designers of the EU's death machine.

This year is the second winter that thousands of asylum seekers will spend on the cold streets of Brussels. More than 2700 of them are still without any material assistance and shelter. 869 of them have a domestic court order recognising their right to reception, yet the Belgian government has consistently refused to implement them. This deliberate refusal to secure the human rights of migrants, especially where these are single males, is not only creating a humanitarian disaster in Belgium's streets but also undermines the raison d'être of Belgian democracy. While the government's actions have been condemned by human rights experts and courts alike, we argue it is arguably reflective of a worrying wider trend in the EU of the impotence of the law to secure human rights for migrants.

In two recent Latvian cases concerning the Russian-speaking minority decided respectively in September and November 2023, the ECtHR made clear that protection of constitutional identity has now been elevated to a legitimate aim for a differential treatment under the Convention. This post explores how the protection of constitutional identity has been deployed to enable a collective punishment by association with a former occupier, and how the ECtHR's reasoning has effectively endorsed such a punishment, which is unbefitting of a liberal democratic system the ECHR aspires to represent. Until the three cases were decided, no liberal European democracy could argue without losing face that suppressing a large proportion of its population was its constitutional identity – one of the goals of its statehood. Today, this claim is seemingly kosher, marking a U-turn in the understanding of what the European human rights protection system is for minorities in Europe.

Integration is becoming increasingly important in law, due to the growing involvement of the legislative, executive and judicial powers at European, national, regional and local levels. This phenomenon concerns third-country nationals and EU citizens, despite the fundamentally different legal regimes applicable to these groups. In this article, I discuss the expansion of integration duties and the different legal mechanisms which they are based on. I propose four conditions- and obligations-based integration models likely to be found in EU law and national laws: the symbolic model, the meritocratic model, the activation model and the selective model. From a legal perspective, identifying these integration mechanisms is essential for assessing compliance with fundamental rights and EU law. Moreover, such a typology is likely to help researchers, policy-makers and the public obtain a better sense of how the conception of integration evolves in our societies and in the legal field in particular. I conclude by briefly sketching a common trend which I observed throughout the four models: they are imbued with a strong socioeconomic dimension hindering the socioeconomically underprivileged categories.

Integration is becoming increasingly important in law, due to the growing involvement of the legislative, executive and judicial powers at European, national, regional and local levels. This phenomenon concerns third-country nationals and EU citizens, despite the fundamentally different legal regimes applicable to these groups. In this article, I discuss the expansion of integration duties and the different legal mechanisms which they are based on. I propose four conditions- and obligations-based integration models likely to be found in EU law and national laws: the symbolic model, the meritocratic model, the activation model and the selective model. From a legal perspective, identifying these integration mechanisms is essential for assessing compliance with fundamental rights and EU law. Moreover, such a typology is likely to help researchers, policy-makers and the public obtain a better sense of how the conception of integration evolves in our societies and in the legal field in particular. I conclude by briefly sketching a common trend which I observed throughout the four models: they are imbued with a strong socioeconomic dimension hindering the socioeconomically underprivileged categories.

Abstract
It is widely agreed that victims of discrimination on traditional status grounds such as gender and race are overrepresented among the poor and undereducated. People living in poverty also face discrimination because of their socioeconomic situation. Many national, European and international antidiscrimination provisions prohibit discrimination on grounds that are related to a person's socioeconomic situation. It is striking, however, that this is hardly applied in practice. On the basis of domestic—Belgian, French and British—and European material, this paper argues that the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of social condition is an empowering legal tool in the protection of disadvantaged people, especially regarding issues of misrecognition. Four reasons for this are considered: the determining role of the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of social condition in applying a direct scrutiny of the socioeconomic underprivileged situation of the applicants, its role in combating stereotypes and stigma against poor people, its important cross-cutting function in cases of multiple discrimination, and its exclusive applicability in some occurrences of discrimination.

Socioeconomic disadvantages are amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic all over the world. Public actions and omissions severely affect the poor, alongside their precarious living, health and working conditions. As we slowly prepare for the aftermath of the pandemic, thanks to the progression of vaccination, especially in developed countries, certain measures taken in this context, more specifically the "vaccination certificates", are likely particularly to affect the poor, who usually also belong to other vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities or single parents, and could eventually constitute for them a state of permanent quarantine. In this contribution, I argue that COVID-19 vaccination certificates are a slippery slope towards exclusion and stigmatisation of the poor through a bureaucratic system based on privileges that raises important questions in light of the fundamental rights of the people who reside at society's margins, struggling to conform to the "phantom of normalcy".