Another new book in the Migration Library is Marie-Bénédicte Dembour’s “When Humans Become Migrants: Study of the European Court of Human Rights with an Inter-American Counterpoint.”

Nowadays, the treatment of migrants is one of the most challenging issues of human rights. In last decades it has become a subject of controversies for many governments and international organizations around the world. If you want to get know more about this subject the book by Marie-Bénédicte Dembour will help you to understand this complex matter and you will enjoy by the analysis and facts presented by the author.

The aim of the book is to scrutinize the way in which the world’s major human rights courts, the European Court of Human Rights and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, deal with complaints lodged by migrants. Moreover, it analyzes and evaluates whether these two courts continue to be loyal to their purpose of protecting human rights of migrants and illustrates differences in their approaches. The book shows how the different political, moral and social conceptions established in Europe and Latin America can affect the courts’ different reasoning and opposing outcomes. The author also incorporates a careful analysis of the related case law with sociological perception and historical awareness. By doing so, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour tries to show that the ECtHR and IACHR were the product of different backgrounds, which led to opposite attitudes towards migrants in their founding texts, and that these differences were reinforced in their developing case law. The book presents and reviews the issue of the detention of irregular migrants. And, what is more, it examines whether the difference in the case law of the two courts is likely to continue, or whether they could accept a more unified practice.

Valerian Karchava