- The ECtHR finally decided SS v Italy; a case that has spawned dozens of scholarly articles since its submission in 2018. The outcome is highly worrying for migrant rights, but at the same time hardly surprising given the court’s previous case law on extraterritorial jurisdiction 🧵1/6 20jurisd.pdf
- From its outset the claimants pushed a constructive notion of extraterritorial jurisdiction, which if accepted would have created a precedent whereby jurisdiction could be established in a much wider set of scenarios involving international cooperation, not just migration control
- At the same time, the Court has come under increasing political pressure on migration issues in recent years, leading it to stall and even backtrack on its previous jurisprudence - see eg eumigrationlawblog.eu/adjudicating...Jun 12, 2025 18:26
- As such, asking the Court to progressively push new legal ground on such a controversial issue was probably always going to be difficult. The Court’s decision in this case is arguably reminiscent of the decades old Bankovic case in this respect
- While one should be cautious to draw overly general conclusions on the future of the Court’s jurisprudence on migration from this single case (cf the post-Bankovic boom in progressive jurisdiction case law); it might be time for a wider and less Strasburg-centric reorientation
- Several alternative approaches to achieving accountability for transnational migration control have been championed in recent years by both academics and practitioners. For one example and some reflections see this collab with @ndftan.bsky.social : www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
