Overview
- An open letter from nine governments, including Denmark and Italy, criticizes the European Court of Human Rights over migration rulings and calls for a new interpretation of the Convention.
- The signatories ask for greater national latitude on deportations and on responses to refugees said to be instrumentalized by Russia.
- Human Rights Watch’s Benjamin Ward calls the demands inappropriate and a danger to Europe’s human-rights system.
- Ward argues that the main obstacle to deportations is non-cooperation by origin countries rather than human-rights law.
- The Convention, signed in 1950 and now binding on 46 states covering roughly 700 million people, faces rising political pressure but no formal legal changes to the Court’s authority have been enacted.