Territory, Terrain, and Human Rights: Jurisdiction and Border Control Under the European Convention on Human Rights

In recent years, European states have become creative in developing strategies to curtail international migration while escaping their obligations under human rights law. These strategies aim at stopping migrants before they can enter a state's jurisdiction, under the argument that states are not bound to their obligations while operating outside their jurisdictional boundaries. This article adopts a geographic perspective to examine the concept of jurisdiction under the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and particularly its nexus with territory. During the last decade, the ECtHR has interpreted jurisdiction to encompass situations where states apprehend migrants outside their borders, thus extending jurisdiction to extraterritorial operations. However, states can circumvent this by manipulating the territorial organisations of their borders to prevent migrants from reaching their territory without directly apprehending them. These strategies include agreements with countries of transit along with other, specific interventions. I take the case of N.D. and N.T. v. Spain as an example of this trend, and of the ECtHR's failure to make European states accountable. As a solution, I argue that jurisdiction should be interpreted to encompass territoriality as one of its components, and under a definition of territory informed by geographic research, and distinct from its conventional definition under international law.