International Human Rights Law and Political Asylum in Comparative Perspective

The proposed project will develop an empirically-tested theory about when international human rights law is referenced in asylum cases. It will analyze asylum decisions by courts and administrative tribunals since 1990 in the United Kingdom according to the way that judges rely on or otherwise reference human rights treaties. Decisions will be coded in order to determine whether the impact of such treaties depends on factors such as incorporation of the treaty into domestic law, the country of origin of the asylum applicant, and the gender of the applicant and judge. The project also features semi-structured interviews with U.K. refugee lawyers to determine the circumstances under which they believe invoking human rights treaties helps or hurts their clients.

The proposed project advances three interrelated branches of socio-legal scholarship: the efficacy of international human rights treaties; the human rights approach to refugee law, and cause lawyering. It takes a nuanced approach toward the efficacy debate, positing that rather than an all or nothing matter, the impact of human rights treaties depends on several factors, including those identified above. Rather than assuming that such treaties invariably benefit refugees, the project asserts that in some cases they may do more harm than good. And the project examines how cause lawyers representing non-citizens utilize human rights law.

The project impacts legal advocacy, legal training, and legal scholarship. First, it will identify ways that lawyers representing asylum-seekers might use international human rights law to more effectively advocate for their clients. Second, it will educate future lawyers by incorporating law students into a team-based project that includes training in empirical methods and complex case analysis. And third, it will contribute to the scholarly debate over principled and strategic uses of international law, focusing on asylum and human rights.