MeDiMi Lecture: The State of the Human Rights of Migrants in Europe

We are experiencing a time of complex simultaneities. Since the 1990s, there has been an enormous surge in international human rights protection for asylum seekers and migrants. Human rights organizations have specialized in strategic litigation, social movements have organized themselves transnationally, European lawyers are working more closely together, refugees are organizing themselves and human rights discourses have gained importance in the court system. Legal struggles for the concrete utopia of human rights are taking place every day.
At the same time, the political sphere is characterized by the demand for a “Retrotopia”, as Zygmunt Bauman has aptly described. Authoritarian movements and parties want to return to a past of the national state that never really existed in this way. But under the slogan “Make Europe Great Again” or “Stop the Boats”, political actors successfully mobilize parts of the electorate and the potential of racist parties is increasing. The human rights system is openly questioned and ideas of national sovereignty are spreading within different European member states. Authoritarian discourses are also translated into the case law of courts. The backlash in the case law of the ECtHR on migration law shows this dramatically.
How can this simultaneity of these developments be explained? What interactions between society, law and politics are currently taking place around the politics of human rights in the 21st century? The lecture will explore these questions by investigating different social fields and political and legal struggles.

Maximilian Pichl is a legal and political scientist. He is Professor of Law at the Department of Social Work at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences. Previously, he was a lecturer in political theory at the University of Kassel and worked as a legal policy officer for the human rights organisation PRO ASYL. He specializes in critical legal theory, asylum law, and police law. His latest book “Law statt Order” has been published by edition suhrkamp. In recent years, he has worked intensively on the reform of the Common European Asylum System.

Chair: Prof. Dr. Susanne Buckley-Zistel (Philipps University Marburg)

This event is embedded in the MeDiMi Conference 2024. Participation is possible without registering for the conference. Please note that the lecture will not be livestreamed.