This talk is co-hosted with the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and the Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group

The monograph Violence against Women and Regimes of Exception: Undoing Discrimination in Migration Law (OUP, September 2025) brings together a series of distinct responses to violence experienced in the context of migration control and offers a new framework for their evaluation. To do so, it integrates doctrinal, empirical, and theoretical material to understand the difference that migration status makes to an experience of violence and to establish how the resulting compounded disadvantage should be remedied. The book’s analysis starts in the UK and with the European Convention on Human Rights, broadening to connect with European Union law and the Council of Europe’s Trafficking and Istanbul Conventions. Consonant with the feminist jurisprudence and approaches to international law with which it engages, the book is structured around the legal challenges that migrant women have brought to the rules that determine their status.

Catherine Briddick will introduce the work and explain the insights it offers into the role and ability of national courts, the ECtHR, and the CJEU to scrutinise different forms of discrimination. She will also situate the arguments made in relation to refugee protection and the broader backlash against migrants occurring in and across the Council of Europe.

Discussants Vladislava Stoyanova and Lourdes Peroni will provide a critique of the book and its main arguments. In so doing, they will draw on and introduce their own research on discrimination and positive obligations.