Asylum detention under the European Convention on Human Rights

Abstract

The detention of migrants who have not committed a crime is one of the most disturbing contemporary practices from the point of view of human rights (Costello 2015). Administrative detention of asylum-seekers poses an additional problem: it causes an independent deterioration of the mental health of people who are (potentially) already highly traumatised (Filges et al. 2015). The intention of this book is to systematise in a comprehensive manner the obligations that States owe to detained asylum-seekers under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This objective is pursued through an analysis of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) regarding Article 5 (right to liberty and related rights, such as the right to a judicial review of the detention) and Article 3 ECHR (conditions of detention) in cases in which the applicant was an asylum-seeker. This case law review is placed within the broader context of the human rights guarantees offered by the Refugee Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The book also seeks to identify whether the tighter migration control policies pushed for by European Union Member States after 2015 impacted the Court’s case law on asylum detention. With this twofold approach, it hopes to serve as a guide for strategic litigation before national courts and the ECtHR, as well as to contribute to the academic debate on how the European Court could raise its standards of protection in migration-related cases.