Can governments use litigation to restrict, rather than enhance, human rights protections for migrants?
The two-day seminar on government litigation practices before international human rights courts and committees, with a particular focus on migration-related cases, explored this question and phenomenon. Governments are increasingly active in shaping the interpretation of human rights law in relation to migration control, acting as 'doctrinal entrepreneurs' in litigation. We welcomed a great group of academics, practitioners and early career researchers from across Europe to examine how governments are actively engaged in legal strategies that shape, resist or even reverse the protection of migrants' rights.
Our aim was to add a new dimension to the expanding body of work that seeks to understand the often-contradictory jurisprudence in migration-related human rights law. The seminar was guided by the following questions:
- How do governments influence the interpretation and development of human rights law through courts and treaty bodies?
- Are they acting as doctrinal entrepreneurs, strategically advocating for specific outcomes through litigation?
- And what does it signify when states - not NGOs - participate in what we refer to as reverse strategic litigation?
These guiding questions structured the four panels of our two-day seminar.
- Panel I explored how states intervene in ECtHR cases involving access to territory, vulnerability, and family life - shaping doctrine while seeming to merely respond.
- Panel II focused on individual countries, illustrating how governments from Poland to Turkey employ legal concepts such as instrumentalisation and voluntariness to legitimise contested practices.
- Panel III brought us to the CJEU, where state interests are promoted through carefully formulated legal questions regarding integration, asylum, and procedural design.
- Panel IV advanced the discussion by questioning what qualifies as “reverse strategic litigation,” its limitations, and how it intersects with implementation, resistance, and norm shaping outside the courtroom.
We are grateful to all the participants, discussants, and organisers who helped make this workshop a platform for engaging interaction.
In the meantime, we look forward to continuing these fresh and new perspectives and conversations, are excited to continue collaborating on this topic, and encourage you to stay tuned for the special issue featuring papers from the conference. Updates will be posted on this website.
