October 29, 2024
By Sarah Ganty In Dian, the Court flushes the promise of the Lăcătuş judgment that ‘begging, as a form of the right to call on another person to obtain his or her assistance, must evidently be regarded as a basic freedom’ (§59) down the drain. The Court adopts a skewed vision of poverty, finding in […]
February 12, 2021
By Dr Dimitrios Kagiaros, Assistant Professor in Public Law and Human Rights, University of Durham In its judgment in Lăcătuş v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) held that fining and imprisoning the applicant for begging amounted to a violation of Article 8 of the Convention. While the judgment raises many important issues […]
February 10, 2021
By Corina Heri, postdoctoral researcher at University of Zürich Begging can be framed in different ways. For city tourism officials, it’s a problem of branding. For local legislatures, it’s an opportunity to show a ‘tough on crime’ stance. For the people who beg themselves, begging can mean survival. But, until recently anyway, the European Court […]
March 08, 2019
By Fulvia Staiano, Adjunct Professor of International Law and European Union Law (Giustino Fortunato University) On 15 January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered an inadmissibility decision on the case of Emabet Yeshtla v. the Netherlands. In this case, the ECtHR was asked to determine whether the withdrawal of the applicant’s housing […]
November 16, 2017
By Valeska David and Sarah Ganty, PhD researchers at Ghent University and Université Libre de Bruxelles On November 6th the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued its judgment in Garib v. the Netherlands (Application n° 43494/09). It thereby confirmed the Chamber’s finding that refusing a housing permit to a single mother […]