Moritz Baumgärtel

University College Roosevelt · Department of Social Sciences

Cambridge Core - Human Rights - Demanding Rights - by Moritz Baumgärtel

The European Court of Human Rights has struggled to integrate the lived experience of migrants into the legal reasoning that underlies a determination of human rights violations. This article introduces the concept of migratory vulnerability in an effort to remedy that shortcoming by making an already existing legal principle fit for the daunting t...

This article classifies and theorizes the strategies of divergence that local authorities employ when confronting the discretionary spaces offered by domestic migration law. We propose a distinction between strategies that are either within or outside the perceived boundaries of the law and those that adopt an explicit or an implicit approach to po...

The fact that migration cases seldom raise any questions under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is neither inevitable nor justified. This article reaffirms the equality provision as a useful and indeed necessary mechanism for the European Court of Human Rights to deal with such applications. More concretely, we build on...

The growing influence and self-confidence of local authorities count among the most interesting recent phenomena in global governance. While not entirely oblivious, international law as a field has struggled to get ahead of this dynamic, focusing instead on how to integrate local authorities into static conventional frameworks firmly based on the n...

Marie-Bénédicte Dembour's When Humans Become Migrants: Study of the European Court of Human Rights with an Inter-American Counterpoint (2015) examines the origins, evolution, and effects of the migration case law of the European Court of Human Rights and contends that it systematically defers to state interests to the detriment of migrant applicant...

In many regions around the world, the governance of migration increasingly involves local authorities and actors. This edited volume introduces theoretical contributions that, departing from the 'local turn' in migration studies, highlight the distinct role that legal processes, debates, and instruments play in driving this development. Drawing on...

Serving as an introduction to the volume, this chapter begins by setting out some of the recent dynamics in migration governance, including devolution, recentralization and the increasingly proactive stance taken by local authorities in this domain. This, in turn, brought about a “local turn” in migration scholarship. Although generally transdiscip...

In many regions around the world, the governance of migration increasingly involves local authorities and actors. This edited volume introduces theoretical contributions that, departing from the 'local turn' in migration studies, highlight the distinct role that legal processes, debates, and instruments play in driving this development. Drawing on...

In many regions around the world, the governance of migration increasingly involves local authorities and actors. This edited volume introduces theoretical contributions that, departing from the 'local turn' in migration studies, highlight the distinct role that legal processes, debates, and instruments play in driving this development. Drawing on...

In the past decade or so, vulnerability has become a fairly prominent concept in human rights law. It has evolved from being an underlying notion to an explicit concept. This column takes stock of vulnerability's relationship to, and possible influence on human rights law, assessing the concept's potential and pitfalls. It focuses on the not altoge...

In recent years, local authorities in Europe have increasingly developed bordering practices that hinder or further migrant rights, such as the freedom of movement. They bypass national borders by facilitating refugee resettlement, they claim local space to welcome or shun certain migrants, and they develop or break down local impediments to migran...

Increasingly, local authorities around the world invoke international law to tackle global challenges autonomously while distancing themselves from national laws and policies, sometimes stimulated by international authorities. This chapter addresses the relevance of national constitutional arrangements for the way in which the resulting conflicts a...

Cities, towns, and their local authorities are increasingly regarded as central actors in the realization of human rights norms. This chapter discusses the role that they (can) play in implementing and possibly shaping human rights norms that address challenges arising from poverty. It also considers to what extent human rights, as law and discours...

The category of the ‘irregular’ migrant is usually seen as the quintessential non-status under international law, offering states plenty of discretion while providing few practically accessible rights for migrants. At the same time, certain local authorities have struggled to justify more pragmatic responses when dealing with the reception of irreg...

The human rights situation of migrants and asylum seekers represents one of the most difficult and pressing issues before the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU. Growing migration flows and the ascendance of a right-wing political climate have created a volatile situation in which governments enact legally questionabl...

Divided Nations and European Integrationby Tristan James Mabry, John McGarry, Margaret Moore, and Brendan O’Leary (eds.)Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in Franceby Elaine R. ThomasPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012Questions of “political membership” and national...

Questions concerning effective remedies in refugee status procedures have recently received a lot of attention in Belgium, most notably in two significant high-level cases. The Belgian Constitutional Court found in January 2014 that the fast-track procedure of annulment for asylum seekers from safe countries of origin did not provide for an effecti...

Adopting a ‘user perspective’ might open promising new avenues for human rights research, especially in a context of global legal pluralism that is characterised by a multiplicity of actors. This article evaluates the conceptual value of the approach by confronting it with three forceful objections to the notions of human rights ‘users’ and ‘usage’...

The Parliament of Kosovo passed a controversial amnesty law in July 2013 within the context of the Brussels-led negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo. This article evaluates the law using a functional framework, thus exploring possible implications with regard to legality, the rule of law, security, the economy, and reconciliation. We find that th...

A striking development in human rights implementation over the past decades has been the rise of human rights cities. This contribution defines a human rights city as an urban entity or local government that explicitly bases its policies, or some of them, on human rights as laid down in international treaties, and thus distinguishes itself from oth...

One way to address the multilayered architecture of international human rights law is to consider the various theories that have focused on the legal effects of globalisation. Based on a review of nine ‘global law’ theories, this article differentiates between three models of human rights integration. ‘Hierarchical integration’ as found in the theo...

As Obama took office at the beginning of 2009, several new figures attained important advisory positions in his administration. Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and now Director of Policy Planning in the State Department, is a prime example of the `change' that has come to Washington. In recent...