Category: The Courts Media

Disneyland Strasbourg: S.S. and others v Italy (12 June 2025)

In S.S., the European Court of Human Rights declared an application about a Libyan pullback inadmissible. One may be critical of this, but after the Court’s case law from the last decade this decision can come as no surprise. However, in a final passage the Court tries to respond to the disappointment it expects from the applicants. In doing so, the Court produces a simulacrum of a human rights ruling: it offers the signs of human rights but in the same gesture short-circuits the application of the Convention. An analysis inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacres et simulation (1981).

Disneyland Strasbourg: S.S. and others v Italy (12 June 2025), Strasbourg Observers 9 July 2025

Rue de la Folie Méricourt, Paris 11, June 2025

The EU Court of Justice refuses to address refugee exclusion (2018)

El Anatsui: Bleeding Takari II, 2007 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Last year the Court of Justice of the European Union issued two judgments on the Syrian refugee crisis. Both cases concerned Europe’s externalization of migration policy – i.e. the legal and practical measures taken to enforce refugee exclusion outside or at the borders of the territories of EU member states. These policies have been labeled as the politics of non-entrée by Hathaway & Gammeltoft-Hansen. In the judgments, the Court decided that it was not competent to rule on the cases because it had no jurisdiction. As I have argued more extensively in an article published open access in the Journal of Refugee Studies, the result of this is that law is not only an instrument for excluding people from European territory. The exclusion now runs through law itself. Although European fundamental human rights law is still formally neutral, the exclusion of non-Europeans is becoming a core element of European law.

The full blogpost was published on Forced Migration Forum, 19 January 2018.