The dissertation tackles the subject of human rights oversight and usage within asylum law. Against the backdrop of two comprehensives literatures, one on the growing role of human rights in refugee law and one on the empirical domains of asylum decision making, this thesis offers a third, socio-legal perspective. This vantage point takes into account the institutional contexts that shape the interactions between national and international law. Accordingly, it views asylum decision making as set of legal practices that broker tensions between state policy and international law.
To this end, the thesis develops the theory of legal entanglement to unpack how international refugee law and international human rights law inter-relate. Fusing this new concept with practice theory, it then maps out the trajectory of the international field since the post-war years. This socio-historical geneology positions how international institutions (notably the UNHCR, the Council of Europe, the UN human rights treaty bodies and EU Court of Justice), as well as academics and ideas have influenced the field across different socio-historical contexts.
Thereafter follows a case study of asylum adjudication in the Nordic countries. It relies on 48 interviews with judges, decision makers, senior secretariat personnel, counsel, civil society organisations and members of UN human rights treaty bodies. It analyses the reasons why there is a significant amount of immigration-related Nordic cases before the European Court of Human Rights and the UN human rights treaty bodies. Thereafter, it discusses the effects of this oversight in the Nordic countries. I argue that paying attention to the processes around interim measures, inadmissibility decisions and the quasi-judicial character of the UN human rights treaty bodies' Views can bling a deeper understanding of these international mechanisms for the asylum domain.
The last part of the thesis takes a closer look at the relevant appeal boards in Norway and Denmark. These national asylum or immigration act as brokers between a highly politicised issue area and an extensive, yet many-faceted international legal regime complex. Alongside increasingly restrictive policy frameworks, these institutions must navigate demands of politicians and various watchdogs in civil society and international organizations and courts. These national institutions are furthermore brokers between the frameworks they rely on: administrative law as deeply entrenched in the Nordic legal systems, and principles of international law that have formally and historically enjoyed a high status for these countries. How decision makers use and relate to human rights norms cannot be seen in isolation of efforts to safeguard institutional identity. This dynamic and uncertain brokering role comes to the forefront in an illustrative example of the turn towards revocation of protection, which has recently become a theme in both Nordic countries.
Ultimately, the dissertation speaks to the strength of international law in one of the most contested areas of current politics in many European states. This approach centres the judicial middle-men, and therefore provides another angle to the account of international courts and state backlash. Understanding the legal framework they navigate as an entangled regime offers another image of the relationship between human rights and refugee law: it can both be consolidated in one sense, and remain separate in another.