Abstract
The start of a new year for the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights provides the opportunity to both look back and forward. In this editorial, we would like to reflect on the performance of the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights in 2019 and present you with our key statistics, as well as to spend a few words on the present issue. Over the course of 2019, 80 manuscripts have been submitted for consideration by the Board of the Netherlands Quarterly out of which 16 have featured as articles in the Quarterly’s issues. This means that our acceptance rate, through a rigorous and triple-blind peer review process, is around one out of each five articles submitted. Of the pieces published in 2019, the column ‘Human rights v. insufficient climate action: the Urgenda case’ by Ingrid Leijten and the article ‘Between facts and norms: testing compliance with Article 8 ECHR in immigration cases’ by Mark Klaassen have been most read so far. The end of 2019 was marked by a particular highlight as we published a special issue bringing together five articles on migration, gendered borders and human rights.
The present issue will certainly engage our NQHR readership again. Our NQHR Executive Board Member, Jasper Krommendijk, has written this issue’s column in which he critically evaluates the UN treaty body system and introduces and explores some proposals to make this system and the process of State reporting more effective. This issue further features three articles. Kristin Henrard in her article ‘Integration reasoning at the ECtHR: challenging the boundaries of minorities’ citizenship’, adopts a citizenship lens to review two European Court of Human Rights cases, notably, S.A.S. v France and Osmanoglu and Kocabas v Switzerland. In doing so, she evaluates the Court’s jurisprudence and discerns a new line of jurisprudence, one that ‘explicitly uses integration reasoning in the justification of limitations to minorities’ fundamental rights’. Critical of this approach, she puts forward a number of recommendations to the Court as to how to proceed in relation to integration reasoning and minorities’ substantive citizenship. Moritz Baumgärtel, in his article ‘Facing the challenge of migratory vulnerability in the European Court of Human Rights’ also focuses on the Strasbourg Court. He introduces the concept of migrant vulnerability in an effort to remedy the shortcomings borne out of the difficulty on the part of both the Court and scholarship to ‘integrate the lived experience of migrants into legal reasoning that underlies a determination of human rights violations’. Finally, Elif Durmus in her article ‘A typology of local governments’ engagement with human rights: Legal pluralist contributions to international law and human rights’ explores the engagement of local governments with human rights law. Drawing upon empirical research data, she maps this phenomenon and proposes a typology of local governments’ engagement with human rights, in doing so demonstrating that local authorities are relevant actors in the protection and promotion of human rights.
This issue, as well as all those of 2019, would not have been what they are without the contribution of our authors and the critical review process of our Executive and international Board members. As always, our publisher SAGE has provided indispensable help and we remain indebted to the work of our executive assistants for their editorial work. In this respect, the NQHR would like to extend a warm welcome to new executive assistant Annelien Tienstra and thank Danielle Snaathorst for her invaluable work for our journal. Finally, we would like to thank our readers for their continued support. We are looking forward to new article submissions on the cutting edge of human rights research.