In September, a new publication by Prof. Dr. Grażyna Baranowska, co-authored with Maybritt Jill Alpes, was published under the title “The Politics of Legal Facts: The Erasure of Pushback Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights.”
In this article, Baranowska and Alpes analyze how the European Court of Human Rights handles evidence of pushbacks. The article asks why so little of what researchers, journalists, civil society actors, and international organizations have documented about violence at Europe’s borders becomes visible in the ECtHR’s judgments. Drawing on a combination of legal and anthropological research methods, the article traces how states and the ECtHR erase pushback evidence both at the borders and during court proceedings. Baranowska and Alpes advocate for a clearer separation between the judicial and the governmental presentation of facts, arguing that the presumption of good faith on the part of states should no longer apply when there is evidence of falsified records and false statements by respondent states.