Extraterritorial human rights obligations in regard to refugees and migrants

Abstract

This chapter analyses the ‘human rights turn’ within scholarly and litigative responses to transnational migration control. It examines the early responses to transnational migration control based on international refugee law and the wider impact of growing human rights litigation on state practice and policy development. It secondly argues that, the historical importance of extraterritorial human rights obligations in this area notwithstanding, we may be seeing the beginning of a counter-progressive development, in which at least some international human rights institutions are facing increasing political pressure to take a more restrictive line in refugee and migrant cases. This not only has implications for a number of currently pending and important cases concerning human rights responsibility related to transnational migration control, but it should also prompt practitioners and scholars looking to promote transnational human rights protection of migrants and refugees to critically rethink existing approaches. To this end, the final part of the article outlines two different, largely complementary approaches to respectively reframe and redirect extraterritorial human claims in the context of transnational migration control.