dr. Aristel Skrbic
Biography
Aristel Skrbic is a legal and political philosopher. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University’s Faculty of Law and Criminology where he is working on decolonial political theory and international migration law as part of the ERC funded MIGJUST project.
Aristel obtained a PhD in philosophy at KU Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy in 2024 where he held an individual fellowship from the Flemish Research Council (FWO). In his project, Aristel worked on a novel approach to EU law at the intersection of constitutional theory and a critique of legal reasoning. The project resulted in five publications, principal among which is “Ideology in the Adjudication of the ECJ”, published in Law and Philosophy in 2023. As part of his project, Aristel was a visiting researcher at the law faculties of University of Vienna and Harvard University. In addition to his philosophical training, Aristel also holds an LLM in European and International Public Law from KU Leuven’s Faculty of Law.
Beyond academia, Aristel is trained as a classical musician (Royal College of Music, London), and has so far called five countries home.
Project
Global Migration Justice: Beyond conflicting approaches to migration in international human rights law - MIGJUST
Abstract:
The key hypothesis of the MIGJUST research project is that there is a fundamental conflict in human rights case law on migration between the human rights approach, adopted by the Inter-American Court and Commission of Human Rights and the African Court and Commission of Human and Peoples’ Rights, and on the other hand the sovereignty approach of the European Court of Human Rights. The difference is also at work in the case law of the UN human rights bodies. The two approaches are reflected in, and are in turn reinforced by, political theory on migration justice. In academic studies, the conflict has not been noted because the case law of the European Court of Human Rights is considered to constitute the most developed version in international human rights law. The conflict between the two approaches is problematic because it goes against the international character of international law and hinders international cooperation. MIGJUST will address this problem by (a) analysing the under-studied case law of the Inter-American, African and UN human rights bodies; (b) carrying out a comparative analysis of the European, Inter-American, African and UN case law in the field of migration; (c) relating the varying positions to political theory on migration justice; and (d) developing methodologies to resolve the doctrinal conflict.