Joint Submission on the State of Access to Justice for Migrants in Europe

Joint Submission on the State of Access to Justice for Migrants in Europe

The ICJ and ECRE have presented today to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants a submission on access to justice for migrants in Europe.

The submission is an input for the forthcoming report of the UN Special Rapporteur on access to justice for migrants to the UN General Assembly.

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) have provided a brief overview of aspects of access to justice for migrants, with a particular focus on asylum seekers and migrant children, in European countries.

The issues dealt with include:

  • obstructions to access to justice in relation to access to the territory;
  • the undue use of national security exceptions to weaken access to justice in immigration procedures;
  • concerns with access to justice in expulsion and detention procedures;
  • specific obstacles to access to justice for asylum seekers, including when appealing the rejection of their claims by first instance asylum authorities before a judicial or administrative appeal body;
  •  specific obstacles to access to justice for undocumented minors.

ICJECRE-NonLegalSubmission-SRMigrants-Access2JusticeEurope4Migrants-2018-ENG (download the submission)

Poland: ICJ and others intervene to support the binding effect of interim measures

Poland: ICJ and others intervene to support the binding effect of interim measures

The ICJ, together with other NGOs, intervened before the European Court of Human Rights in MA v Poland, concerning interim measures to protect applicants for asylum at the Polish-Belarus border.

The case concerned a family of asylum seekers who sought to apply for international protection in Poland, at a border crossing with Belarus, but were repeatedly turned away by border guards. The European Court granted interim measures indicating that the applicants should not be returned from Poland to Belarus, and that their asylum application should be examined by the Polish authorities. These interim measures were not complied with.

In their third party intervention in the case, the ICJ, ECRE, AIRE Centre and the Dutch Council for Refugees emphasised the binding nature of the obligation to comply with interim measures of the European Court of Human Rights, supported by the jurisprudence of the Court and by comparative standards of other international human rights mechanisms.

They further submitted that, where interim measures relate to children, irrespective of whether the children are applicants in the case, the State must abide by the measure indicated with special diligence and take the appropriate protective measures which the age, level of maturity, environment and experiences of the children require.

Poland-MA-ECtHR-amicus-ICJ&others-final-eng-2017 (download the intervention)

Turkey: training for lawyers and CSOs on rights of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers

Turkey: training for lawyers and CSOs on rights of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers

Today begins in Izmir (Turkey) a two-day training for lawyers and CSO practitioners representing and working with migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.

This event is organized by ICJ, in cooperation with its partners Refugee Rights Turkey, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), Mülteci-Der (MD) and ICJ-EI, as part of the EU co-financed project Fostering Access to Rights for Migrants, Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in Turkey.

30 lawyers and civil society practitioners – representing nine different bar associations and relevant organisations from the Istanbul area and other nearby key migration and asylum locations – are taking part in the training on 9 and 10 December.

The training aims to update lawyers and CSOs on the international and national law on the rights of refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers in order to be effective in their work at both the national and international levels. It aims at an effective implementation of the Turkish legal framework on asylum and migration.

The main thematic areas to be discussed will be the principle of non-refoulement, international protection, detention and access to economic, social and cultural rights.

The training will use as a basis the draft training materials prepared by the ICJ and its partners (to be published an the end of 2019) and, among other sources, the ICJ Practitioners Guide no. 6: Migration and International Human Rights Law.

The project “Fostering Access to Rights for Migrants, Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in Turkey” is funded by the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) of the European Union.

Turkey-Training-Izmir-MigrationAsylum-Agenda-2017-tur-eng (download the agenda in Turkish and English)

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