ICON S Conference 17 – 19 June 2016 Humboldt University Berlin

logical change: does the narrative of constitutional
identity mark a shift in the legal consciousness that
finds its roots in the evolution of European societies?
Although sovereignty still matters, the discourse of
constitutional identity better captures the current core
values of the European legal culture than the traditional
language of sovereignty. I will try to determine whether
constitutional identity and sovereignty are essentially
different or whether the former is ‘only’ the new avatar
of the latter.
Jan Zgliński: Discovering Passive Virtues: The
Court of Justice and the Margin of Appreciation
The Court of Justice an institution erstwhile notorious
for its activism increasingly shows signs of selfrestraint.
Not only does it grant Member State legislators
more and more regulatory freedom through the
margin of appreciation doctrine it passes a growing
number of review responsibilities onto national courts.
Normatively this raises some important questions: is
this development defensible from a constitutional
standpoint? Is it perhaps even desirable? The paper
will drawing from free movement case-law inquire into
what is at stake when the Court decides on its review
approach. It will explain that this decision is very challenging
as EU constitutional law has come to embrace
a series of irreconcilable desires: we want democratic
governance and judicial review a powerful Union and
strong Member States uniform application of EU law
and a meaningful role for national courts. The paper
will propose a way out of this dilemma based on the
ideas of representation and expertise.
Bosko Tripkovic: Deference and Diffidence in
Human Rights Adjudication
The paper develops an ethical framework that
justifies deference in human rights adjudication. The
opponents of deference claim that it gives up on the
universality of human rights, leaves them without normative
foundation, and results in diffidence that merely
reaffirms the existing consensus. The background idea
is that human rights cannot gain normative traction
lest they are supported by an external, metaphysical
account of value. In contrast, the paper defends
deference from an internal, practical perspective, and
argues that the normativity of human rights does not
follow from the metaphysics of value but from an appropriate
self-understanding of each system of human
rights protection. The paper elucidates the central parameters
of this self-understanding, argues that it is
able to sustain the boundary between deference and
diffidence, and demonstrates how it can both heed the
importance of human rights and allow for an attractive
degree of variation in human rights adjudication.
67 LAW(S) OF REFUGEES I
Panel formed with individual proposals.
Participants Jennifer Bond
Helene Heuser
Isabelle Sauriol
Tamar Megiddo
Tiago Monteiro
Name of Chair Tamar Megiddo
Room BE2 140/142
Jennifer Bond: Predictable & Preventable: Mass
Refugee Influxes & Threats to Human Rights &
Global Stability
This paper argues that global instability resulting
from situations of mass refugee influx is both predictable
and preventable. Drawing on a combination of
my academic research and my experience as Special
Advisor to the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and
Citizenship on Canada’s recent Syrian refugee initiative,
I will explore tensions between the normative value of
the international asylum system and the responses of
individual state actors to the mass movement of people
across international borders. My conclusion is that
international commitments to non-refoulement are simultaneously
providing an infrastructure for protection
in individual cases and being used to circumvent other
critically necessary responses to situations of mass
migration. The ultimate result is both an unnecessary
failure of our collective commitment to basic human
rights and an unnecessary exacerbation of the risk of
massive global instability.
Helene Heuser: Refuge Cities
The national, supranational and international responses
of states to refugees are failing. Sanctuary
Cities in the US, Canada and Great Britain, Solidarity
Cities in South America, the International Cities of
Refuge Network at the Council of Europe, and refugee
protest movements in cities like Hamburg and Berlin
are just some examples for a local, transnational approach
to migration. The notion of refuge-cities by the
philosopher Jacques Derrida provides a theoretical
concept that helps to integrate these practices in a
long history from the Greek polis over biblical asylum
cities up to the villes franches of the middle Ages. He
sees the city as a most promising space to cultivate
the right to hospitality. This paper will explore how
decentralized networks of local governments or civilsociety
initiatives are showing a more adequate and
humane tendency towards migration.
Isabelle Sauriol: Women and Children First:
Canadian Policies on Syrian Refugees Selection
On November 22, 2015, the Canadian government
followed on their electrical promise to resettle 25 000
Syrian refugees, and announced that they would be
Concurring panels 106