The End of Human Rights Dynamism? Judgments of the ECtHR on ‘Hot Returns’ and Humanitarian Visas as a Focal Point of Contemporary European Asylum Law and Policy

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.