Immigration Article of the Day: Opening the black box of international human rights enforceability through the study of migrant rights by Anna Boucher & Eda Gunaydin

The Immigration Article of the Day is "Opening the black box of international human rights enforceability through the study of migrant rights" by Anna Boucher & Eda Gunaydin, just published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs.

The full article is available here.

Here is the abstract:

International relations, international law and political science provide different accounts of the relationship between international and domestic law and how this relationship should be measured and assessed. Yet the ‘black box’ of the state, and particularly the judicial system, as the core implementer of international law, remains underexamined empirically. This article presents findings from a unique cross-national database, the Migrant Worker Rights Database, in which 869 court cases were analysed to ascertain the influence of international law within domestic judicial outcomes. We conclude that while international law is not very important in broad domestic enforcement of migrant rights through the courts, that when it is utilised domestically, it is influenced by domestic factors that include: the method of incorporation of international law into domestic law – through executive or legislative powers; judicial reticence, informed by judicial seniority; and the capacity for litigants to appeal to supranational courts. This leads us to conclude that while international law generally does not play a large role in the domestic legal enforcement of migrant rights, when it does, domestic factors are important for supporting or blocking such inclusion.