About the Event
Despite growing political backlash against international courts in migration governance, we know little about how international rulings are received within the day-to-day operations of domestic legal systems. Taking the Danish Refugee Appeals Board (RAB) as a case-study, we analyse the processes by which international rulings become cited in everyday judicial reasonings and the function(s) that these citations serve. We introduce the notion of “institutional filters” to conceptualize the role played by the wider institution, here the RAB, in flagging international rulings of interests for the judicial practice and, in doing so, framing the concrete function performed by that ruling in everyday judicial reasonings.
To do so, we computationally extract citations of international rulings in a corpus of over 20,000 decisions from the RAB (2001-2024), as well as in the annual reports and minutes from internal meetings of the RAB in the same timeframe. We further identify in the institutional filters the specific legal arguments derived from that ruling to assess whether institutional filters effectively embed and fixate specific international judicial arguments in Danish asylum practice. We find that the RAB’s engagement with international rulings is primarily moderated via these institutional filters which pre-digest international judicial arguments. We further find that many references are substantively attached to a restriction of applicants’ rights, suggesting that domestic courts, and institutional filtering, can contain the reach of these international interpretations by relying on restrictive arguments, and in a number of cases, distinguishing these from the case at hand in a routine fashion.
These findings have important theoretical implications for research on everyday citations to international rulings as it suggests, contrary to extant literature, that domestic citations of international courts cannot be directly interpreted as a proxy to assess the perceived authority of the court cited but instead may signal back to domestic and institutional guidance.
Nora Stappert
Nora Stappert is an associate professor at the Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law (Mobile) at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on how the authority and legitimacy of international courts is established, maintained and challenged, and how international law changes over time outside of formal treaty negotiations. She holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford, an MSL from Yale Law School, and an MPhil from Oxford. She currently leads the ANCHOR project, which examines how interpretive shifts at international courts are accepted or resisted within domestic legal systems, using international refugee and migration law as a test case.
Sarah Scott Ford
Sarah Scott Ford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law (Mobile) at the University of Copenhagen. She holds degrees in Human Rights from Malmo University and Sociology of Law from Lund University. Her PhD at the University of Copenhagen on human rights in Nordic asylum institutions is forthcoming as a monograph with Bristol University Press. Her research focuses on international law in national contexts and how courts shape migration matters.
Anouk Marine Lamé
Anouk Lamé is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence for Global Mobility Law (MOBILE) at the University of Copenhagen. She holds degrees in political science and international affairs from Sciences Po, Paris, and legal theory from EHESS/University Paris X-Nanterre. Her PhD at the University of Copenhagen examined the judiciary's role in defining migrants' irregularity through a case study of deportation cases in French lower courts.
Programme
- 12:15-12:25 Welcome by the co-leader of the Research Group on Global Challenges to Human Rights, Prof. Nina Reiners, and the leader of the Thematic Group on Migration, Dr. Özlem Gürakar Skribeland
- 12:25-13:00 Presentation by Nora Stappert, Sarah Scott Ford, and Anouk Lamé
- 13:00-13:30 Open group discussion and Q&A
Practical Information
This seminar will be held in English. The draft paper will be shared with those who have registered prior to the event. We kindly ask that participants register in advance. The event is held on the 8th floor of Domus Juridica. If you do not have an access card, please reach out to dila.yesil@nchr.uio.no when outside.