Protecting human dignity across and within borders: the legal regulation of international migration in Europe

This chapter zooms in on the legal regulation of human mobility in Europe by making use of the concept of human dignity. The chapter analyses the way in which the European Convention of Human Rights and EU law protect seriously ill migrants against removal, as well as EU asylum law that requires asylum seekers to be provided with dignified standards of living. We will see that current European regulation and case law raises the question whether protecting the dignity of migrants is a matter of justice or a matter of humanitarian concern. While there is a certain narrow core of the right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment that applies irrespective of the legal relationship between individual and state, the periphery of this right covers a whole range of harms which will be seen as dignity harm depending on the way in which the law has regulated relations between states and individuals. Despite its rhetorical reliance on universality, human rights law does not apply fully outside the confines of the institutional (as contrasted to factual) relationship between state and individual, which raises urgent problems with regard to adjudicating transnational justice.