Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights

The article examines the constraints that irregular migrants' immigration status exerts on the realisation of their basic social human rights. To this end, the article focuses on the right to health care and undertakes a comparative study of irregular migrants' access to health care in France, the United Kingdom and Canada. The study shows that States perceive the conferment of social rights on irregular migrants as an erosion of the government's immigration power notwithstanding their characterisation as human rights. The resource-intensive nature of the right to health care further heightens States' reluctance to extend this right to irregular migrants. Yet compliance with international human rights law and respect for human dignity require that States reinstate personhood as a source of rights and therefore reassess the relevance of their immigration power.

This article seeks to examine the effectiveness of the fact-finding activities undertaken by the European Court of Human Rights (and the former Commission). It argues that while some fact-finding missions have revealed certain weaknesses in the past, the very conduct of such missions remains indispensable – in the interests both of litigants and the credibility of the Strasbourg system itself. Therefore, some greater thought needs to be given to practical ways and means to fully tap the Court's fact-finding potential.