Right-wing populism, crumbling migrants’ rights and strategies of resistance in Belgium

This chapter adopts a two-stage analysis of legal resilience against far-reaching restrictions of migrants’ rights. It first investigates the resilience of the Belgian constitutional system against potential hostile take-over by right-wing populists. It is concluded that the constitutional framework provides relatively robust protection against democratic decay, as a result of which the separation of powers remains intact. At the same time, most constitutional safeguards that prevent a hypothetical slide towards authoritarianism in Belgium only provide weak constraints against the very real an... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Desmet, Ellen
Smet, Stijn
Dokumenttyp: bookChapter
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Verlag/Hrsg.: Cambridge University Press
Schlagwörter: Law and Political Science / Belgium / migration / migrants’ / rights / separation of powers / right-wing populism / constitutional resilience / legal resilience / independent courts
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27369107
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8756133

This chapter adopts a two-stage analysis of legal resilience against far-reaching restrictions of migrants’ rights. It first investigates the resilience of the Belgian constitutional system against potential hostile take-over by right-wing populists. It is concluded that the constitutional framework provides relatively robust protection against democratic decay, as a result of which the separation of powers remains intact. At the same time, most constitutional safeguards that prevent a hypothetical slide towards authoritarianism in Belgium only provide weak constraints against the very real and systematic undermining of migrants’ rights. Therefore, during the second stage of the analysis an assessment is made of the room for legal resilience in Belgium. Unlike in Poland and Hungary, it is shown, civil society actors have been able – and often forced – to resort to the independent courts in a bid to safeguard migrants’ rights in Belgium. In practice, the chapter concludes, this has led to mixed results, in that courts have only safeguarded minimal respect for migrants’ rights rather than adopting a maximalist interpretation. The room for legal resilience against restrictive migration laws and policies in Belgium thus remains more limited than could be expected.