Lone Wolves of Strasbourg? the Lawyers behind Migration Cases at the European Cout of Human Rights

Migrants, particularly those deemed irregular, undocumented, or even 'illegal', often face significant challenges in having their human rights respected (Dembour and Kelly, 2011). This paper analyses the role of individual human rights lawyers, defined as those not affiliated with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), in representing applicants before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in immigration-related cases against Turkey. On the one hand, the ECtHR has long served as a critical judicial forum for lawyers who recognise the potential of the European Convention on Human Rights as a basis for breaking new ground in domestic and European legal systems. On the other hand, since its establishment, scholarship has observed fluctuations in the right of individual application. In particular, over the last fifteen years, access to the ECtHR has increasingly been constrained. Additionally, some scholars have identified blind spots in the protection of human rights due to NGOs’ dependence on private funders, whose political orientations often influence the nature of cases brought before the ECtHR (Cliquennois, 2021). For these reasons, examining the role of individual lawyers is especially relevant today. The research question of this paper is the following: How, and to what extent, do individual litigant lawyers contribute to the development of ECtHR case law in migration-related cases? This central question gives rise to sub-questions, including: How do these lawyers become familiar with ECtHR procedures? How do they select the cases they bring to the ECtHR? How do they apply their legal expertise to individual cases? And how do they transform legal arguments from national judicial systems to the ECtHR framework? To address these questions, we propose a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative methods (i.e., systematic analysis of case law) with qualitative methods (i.e., semi-structured interviews with selected lawyers).