* Sebastián Alejandro Rey, ‘Advances and Setbacks in the Case-Law of the European Court of Human Rights on Serious Violations of Human Rights’(2025) 14/1, International Human Rights Review:
‘This article examines the advances and setbacks in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or the Strasbourg Court) on serious violations of human rights since its first major judgment: the ‘Greek Case’. In particular, it focuses on the arguments advanced by the ECtHR to justify the use of criminal law as a means to ensure the respect and guarantee of human rights. The article also considers the scope assigned to the duty to investigate and punish serious violations of human rights, as well as the Court’s interpretation of the principle of legality and the applicability of statutory limitations to these crimes. The article makes references to the crime of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances.’
* Dominika Bek and Magdalena Półtorak, ‘The Impact of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) on European Criminal Law Standards in the Area of Selected Culturally Motivated Crimes’, (2025)14/1, International Human Rights Review:
‘This article examines gender-determined vulnerability within the context of the Istanbul Convention, which aims to combat violence against women and domestic violence. It discusses the implementation challenges faced by States, particularly Poland, in addressing culturally motivated crimes like forced marriage and female genital mutilation. The article analyses whether recent legal changes align with the Convention’s goals and explore the impact of grevio’s evaluations on national criminal laws. The study emphasises the need to tackle underlying gender inequalities and stereotypes to effectively protect vulnerable groups and ensure justice for victims of violence.’
* Hannah Zaruchas, ‘Playing for Time: Temporary Status, Migration Control and the Human Rights of Forced Migrants to Family Reunification’ (2025) XX, pp. 1–21, International Journal of Refugee law:
‘The article analyzes a set of cases in front of the European Court of Human Rights in which forced migrants challenged restrictions to family reunification in human rights law. These restrictions were largely justified by States through the temporary nature of the sponsor’s migration status. Taking this argument as a starting point, the article brings legal analysis into conversation with normative theory to disentangle the relationship between migration status, temporality, and the human right to family life. It reconstructs what role the sponsor’s membership interests play in the assessment of their interest in family reunification under the ECHR. Then it is shown that membership is largely defined by reference to the temporal qualifications of a stay made by migration status. While the temporary nature of one’s stay entails an argument for exclusion, a permanent stay entails an argument for inclusion. However,the case of refugees shows that rights are also extended based on the prediction that a stay is likely permanent. This prediction is made in the form of migration status. The article then explores avenues for contesting the presumption of temporariness made by temporary status in human rights law. While temporariness can be challenged retrospectively based on other notions of membership than migration status such as ties and the length of stay, it is structurally difficult to challenge in its prospective dimension. This gap between the prospective prescription of temporariness through migration status and the retrospective claim to inclusion through human rights allows States to significantly delay interests in family reunification, gaining weight through temporary status.’
* Witold Klaus and Magdalena Kmak, ‘ECtHR jurisprudence amid political shifts: rolling back the protection against pushback’ (2025) 29/8, The International Journal of Human Rights:
‘In this article, we scrutinise the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments issued in cases of border protection and pushbacks since 2016. We argue that these judgments issued amid political shifts on national and regional levels and mounting criticism of the Court have generated interconnected effects of (1) lowering the standards of protection of the people on the move; (2) shifting the emphasis from human rights protection at the border towards protection of the border; and (3) particularisation of rights protection by limiting protection of certain groups of people on the move. Such a process leads, as we argue, to undermining the Court’s original mandate from primarily safeguarding individuals’ human rights (the person-centric mandate) towards foregrounding the sovereignty of states.’
* Esra Demir-Gürsel, ‘The shifting frames of the Council of Europe: from totalitarianism to authoritarianism, from populism to democratic backsliding’ (2025) 29/8, The International Journal of Human Rights:
‘Over the past two decades, several European states have undergone a notable shift away from liberal democracy and human rights. These trends have disrupted the foundational discourses of the Council of Europe (CoE), which historically has positioned Europe as a bastion of human rights and democracy. Various terms – including illiberalism, populism, authoritarianism, and democratic backsliding – have been used to describe these developments. In the CoE context, ‘populism’ and ‘democratic backsliding’ have become dominant frames for defining internal trends against the image that the CoE constructs for Europe, while ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ have been used to frame its past and present external Others. This article examines how these four concepts – totalitarianism, authoritarianism, populism, and democratic backsliding – are deployed within the CoE to analyse their discursive functions across different phases of the CoE’s history. Drawing on frame analysis, it traces how and to which effect these concepts have been mobilised in the CoE context. The article concludes that these concepts are employed less to denote clearly differentiated political forms or categories with distinct political and legal implications; rather, they are used as discursive tools to frame Europe as associated with human rights and democracy, in opposition to its external Others.’
* Grażyna Baranowska, ‘Making pushback facts visible: a review of tools in existing case law and the procedural framework of the European Court of Human Rights’ (2025) 29/8, The International Journal of Human Rights:
‘Pushbacks are practices which result in migrants being forced across borders without an individual assessment of their protection needs. Pushback facts, however, often remain invisible in ECtHR case law because judges rely on state evidence, while states do not consistently record their practice and prevent migrants and civil society organisations from producing evidence. Additionally, states have at times failed to submit requested evidence or submit wrong or incomplete information. Our article intervenes in this problematic context to ask whether and how the ECtHR can make pushback facts visible. Combining case law analysis with an empirical analysis of adjudication and litigation practices, we argue that the ECtHR can make pushback facts visible by mobilising existing tools to gather more evidence and analyse existing evidence in the light of the above-described context. With this argument, we highlight and bridge a crucial divide: while social sciences illuminate the context of evidence gathering, legal scholarship focuses on the analysis of evidence. By interweaving both approaches, this interdisciplinary article proposes a way forward that is both supportive for the ECtHR in its assessment of the factual circumstances of pushback cases, whilst also effective in view of existing case law and the procedural framework.’
* Nurbanu Hayir, ‘Non-member migrants in spaceless zones: the spatial membership frame of embassies and consulates in the European Court of Human Rights’ (2025) 29/7, The International Journal of Human Rights:
‘This article discusses the two competing frames of human rights in European legal and political thought that continue to undergird the competing claims on externalised migration control in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR): rights of humans against the European state power (a relational frame) versus human rights of Europeans (a spatial membership frame). Drawing from the case of asylum-seeking visa applicants at a Belgian embassy, M.N. and Others v.Belgium (2020), the article traces the prevalence of the spatial membership frame in the history of the ECtHR and the European consular jurisdiction under capitulation treaties in the eighteenth to nineteenth century to capture its recurrence in contemporary European human rights thinking on migration. It explores the influence of European interests in colonies during the Convention drafting and in ‘semi-civilised' regions such as the Ottoman Empire, Japan and China on the development of extraterritorial European jurisdiction. These interests shaped a spatial membership frame that prioritised the rights of European nationals, both at home and abroad, while excluding non-nationals from protection despite Europe's expansive sovereignty. It then reflects on how this spatial membership frame influences the ECtHR’s approach to embassies and consulates in human rights law.’
