Courting Asylum: How Asylum Claimants in Greece are Using Judicial Power to Combat neo-Refoulement and the EU-Turkey Safe Third Country Agreement

Abstract

The international refugee regime is marked by a widening gap between the constitutional democratic values of countries in the global north and the practices employed by their state executives. While states have committed to the rights of refugees by joining the 1951 Refugee Convention, they have simultaneously subverted the rule of law in the name of security by instituting practices that externalize asylum: neo-refoulement. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which judicial power can be used to combat executive practices of neo-refoulement. This article considers asylum claims heard in the Greek appellate court system pertaining to the safe third country agreement between the European Union and Turkey. The article concludes that, under a system of coequal institutions, judicial power and case law harbour the potential for necessitating the consideration of all individual asylum cases effectively disarming practices of neo-refoulement.