Judicial Diplomacy in Refugee Protection Governance: The ECtHR between Crisis Management and Rights-Centred Adjudication

This article rethinks the European Court of Human Rights’ role in refugee protection by reading its asylum-related case law as acts of judicial diplomacy. Diplomacy here is not institutional outreach; it is the Court’s reasoning practice: how it frames facts, allocates responsibility, and signals the practical limits of discretion under crisis pressure. This article develops a two-axis framework: (i) anticipatory and crisis-responsive diplomacy, capturing how Strasbourg calibrates tone, scope and evidentiary demands in high-stakes cases and (ii) vertical and horizontal diplomacy, tracking how judgments speak “downwards” into domestic asylum systems and “sideways” across overlapping legal regimes. A close reading of leading decisions on non-refoulement, jurisdiction, and vulnerability shows that the Court’s protective and restrictive strands often follow recurring diplomatic logics rather than mere inconsistency. This article concludes with a rights-centred benchmark for judicial diplomacy: legitimacy in refugee protection turns on making non-refoulement and individualised assessment practically reachable through clear jurisdictional reasoning and effective remedies.