This article examines the law and politics of asylum in Europe. The aim is to explore both the construction of ‘Fortress Europe’ and the resistance within Europe to the dominant policy response. Human rights law now plays an important part in the struggle to secure decent treatment for asylum seekers in Europe. Its use has exposed serious problems with existing refugee law and policy. In examining the law and politics of human rights this article suggests that dialogic models of law are useful. In particular they bring back into the picture those individuals and groups which make change happen in practice. This allows us to ‘ground’ the discourses of human rights and refugee law much more securely within concrete political struggles over the terms of asylum policy. At a time when human rights lawyers are becoming part of the international ‘mainstream’, this article suggests that we must be alive to the importance of dissident voices that remain on the margins.
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