Tales of Agency and Exclusion

This article offers a critical analysis of the role of agency in international legal protection, situating it in the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence on the prohibition of collective expulsions. It explores the legal premises that the Court relied upon to construe the ‘own-culpable-conduct’ exception to Article 4 of Protocol no. 4, as well as the key factors that determined the Court’s balancing test between state interests and migrant rights. This enables a discussion on the assumptions and structural bias underpinning the Court’s reasoning in migration-related cases as well as on alternative lines of reasoning that were left aside. Ultimately, deconstructing the own-culpable-conduct exception serves as an exercise to illustrate how international human rights law accommodates migrants’ rightlessness and how the law’s treatment of agency generates exclusion

Agency (philosophy · Human rights · International law · Jurisprudence · State (computer science · Underpinning · European Criminal Justice and Data Protection · Gender and Women's Rights · Migration, Refugees, and Integration