Expulsion of seriously ill migrants: a new ECtHR ruling reshapes ECHR and EU law

In what is possibly one of the most important judgments of 2016, Paposhvili v. Belgium, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) memorably reshaped its case law on when Article 3 ECHR (which bans torture or other inhuman or degrading treatment) applies to the expulsion of seriously ill migrants. In a unanimous judgment, the Court left behind the restrictive application of the high Article 3 threshold set in N. v. the United Kingdom and pushed for a more rigorous assessment of the risk of ill-treatment in these cases.

The main part of this blog post addresses the ECtHR’s interpretation of the ECHR in Paposhvili, while in the Annex to the post, Steve Peers considered its application within the scope of EU law.