Mobility Phase: Central European University | Hungarian Helsinki Committee
“A Right to the Effective Access to Rights”: a Pleonasm?
Dr. Sarah Ganty is J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, theorizing the concept of Merizenship, which she has introduced. She is also FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Human Rights Center of Ghent University and teaches at the Central European University in Vienna and the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis in Brussels. Sarah's first monograph, dissecting the concept of “migrants’ integration” in EU law, has just been published by Larcier and comes on top of a handful of articles on migrants’ integration and discrimination on grounds of socioeconomic disadvantages, which appeared in the Human Rights Law Review, European Journal of Risk Regulation, European Journal of Migration and Law, Revue de droit belge des étrangers and Revue Trimestrielle des droits de l’homme, among others. Sarah holds an LL.M from Yale Law School (2018), where she was a Fulbright Fellow, and a master’s degree in Law from Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) (2010). She was a visiting researcher at Berkeley Law School (Spring 2015) and at the Centrum voor migratierecht in Nijmegen in The Netherlands (Fall 2014). Her Ph.D. is from ULB Brussels (2019). She was called to the Bar of Brussels in 2010 and practiced constitutional, administrative, refugee and immigration law.
“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.
