Framing Migration in Human Rights: How the Reasoning of the European Court of Human Rights Legitimises Border Regimes

Abstract This article seeks to trouble the idea that human rights provide a progressive standard in matters of migration. It does so by drawing on frames analysis to investigate the way that the reasoning of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) legitimises border regimes rather than challenging them. The article considers three issues as examples. First, the ECtHR’s understanding of racial discrimination moves colonial histories and political economy out of the frame, thus preventing contestation of border regimes in those terms. Second, the ECtHR’s treatment of vulnerability is based on state categorisation of migrants, which normalises the violence of border regimes in all but the most extreme cases of vulnerability. Third, the ECtHR’s approach to human trafficking involves a framing of states as saviours, thus setting up border controls as a positive measure rather than a root cause of trafficking. The article ends by revisiting the potential and limitations of human rights set against the horizon of border abolition.