Mobility Phase: Central European University | Hungarian Helsinki Committee
“A Right to the Effective Access to Rights”: a Pleonasm?
Dr. Sarah Ganty joined Peking University’s School of Transnational Law as Assistant Professor in 2026. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Central Eurpean University (CEU), engaged with the Rule of Law Clinic at the CEU Democracy Institute and a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School in New Haven (degree expected in 2026). At Yale, Sarah served as Co-President of the YLS European Law Association from 2020 to 2025. She was called to the Bar of Brussels in 2013, focusing on constitutional, administrative and refugee and migration law. She has also held Visiting Professorships at the University of Hong Kong, CEU, Université libre de Bruxelles, the Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis in Brussels and the LUISS Guido Carli Faculty of Law in Rome. Sarah held visiting research appointments at the Bonavero Institute (Mansfield College, Oxford), Berkeley Law School and Radboud University Nijmegen, among others. Sarah also contributes to the drafting of third-party interventions before the European Court of Human Rights. Sarah’s scholarship examines how societal hierarchies and stratifications are maintained and reproduced through law. Her current research explores the concept of merit in law and its role in shaping the distribution of public, economic, and social goods. She is particularly interested in questions of poverty and socioeconomic inequality.
“A Right to the Effective Access to Rights”: a Pleonasm?
Rights – whether substantive or procedural – are a mirage for some groups because administrative and practical obstacles turn the Rule of Law into a chimaera. In my research project, I tackle this question by examining the existence of a right to the effective access to rights and whether it is a part of or should be recognised as a core element of the Rule of Law. Tackling this issue is crucially important. Indeed, if the principle of equality before the law and fundamental rights have been widely recognised as part of the Rule of Law, one conundrum remains: many people do not have access to the rights they are entitled to because of practical and administrative barriers. Some sporadic measures have been taken to alleviate these problems, in a limited way however. On this basis, I argue that beyond the “right to have rights”, as masterfully theorised by Hannah Arendt concerning post-war stateless persons, the Rule of Law is not worthy of its name if it does not encompass a general right to the effective access to rights deriving from substantive and procedural rights. In short, the right to have effective access to rights is not a pleonasm.
