Migrants’ Rights, Populism and Legal Resilience in Europe

Bringing together scholars of migration and constitutional law, this volume analyses the problematic relationship between the rise of populism, restrictions of migrants’ rights and democratic decay in Europe. By offering both constructive and critical accounts, it creates a nuanced debate on the possibilities for and limitations of legal resilience against populist erosion of migrants’ rights. Crucially, it does not merely diagnose the causes of restrictions of migrants’ rights but also proposes how the law might be used as a solution. In this volume, the law is considered as both a source of resilience and part of the problem at three distinct levels: the legal-theoretical, the European and the national level. It is a major contribution to the literature on migrants’ rights, offering a nuanced account of how legal resilience might be used to safeguard migrants’ rights against further erosion in populist times. This book is available as Open Access.

Vladislava Stoyanova is Associate Professor of Public International Law at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests cover international human rights law, and refugee and migration law. She is the author of Human Trafficking and Slavery Reconsidered: Conceptual Limits and States' Positive Obligations in European Law (2017).

Stijn Smet is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at Hasselt University. He is the author of Resolving Conflicts between Human Rights: The Judge's Dilemma (2017) and co-editor of When Human Rights Clash at the European Court of Human Rights: Conflict or Harmony? (2017). He is co-editor-in-chief of the Strasbourg Observers blog.