Dr Liam Thornton: Human Rights Law & Freedom to Work for Asylum Seekers
The system of international human rights is often viewed as seeking to emphasise the centrality of human personhood, the privileging of dignity, and the enjoyment of human rights based on equality and non-discrimination. International human rights law only ever partially fulfils this aim. The centrality of state sovereignty and the relatively weak mechanisms for rights enforcement all act as a bulwark towards ultimate rights fulfilment. Focusing on freedom to work for asylum seekers, I engage with the varying legal standards on this legal rights claim. Ambiguities between and within international and European rights legal protections can often allow States reject any such freedom to work for asylum seekers. Nevertheless, even within these sites of legal ambiguity, there has, developed at least some sort of legal right for asylum seekers to lay claim to a freedom to work.
This paper presents an overview of how an ill-defined rights claim of ‘freedom to work for asylum seekers’, is solidifying across municipal, European and international legal systems. The constitutionalisation of a freedom to work for asylum seekers in the Irish Supreme Court provides significant insight into the potential, and only the potential, for legal solidification of a freedom to work for asylum seekers within legal systems. This may ultimately result in achieving the foundational aims of international human rights within a legal framing, wherein dignity becomes a key interpretive tool for recognition of oft politically ignored and publicly unpopular groups, such as asylum seekers, as legal rights holders.
Liam is an assistant professor in law in University College Dublin, Ireland and European Fellow in IAHS. You can access information on Liam’s research interests and publications here. This work-in-progress talk is part of a wider research project on social and economic rights legal entitlements for asylum seekers across international and European legal systems that I am engaging with at IASH.
[IASH Work in Progress talk]