By Mark Klaassen (assistant professor of immigration law at the Europa Institute of Leiden University)

To what extent can irregular migrants rely on the protection of Article 8 ECHR to regularize their irregular residence? The European Court of Human Rights (the Court) has dealt with this issue before, in different cases with various factual backgrounds. The starting point of the Court has always been – and remains to some extent – that only in exceptional circumstances the state is under an obligation to regularize the stay of an irregular migrant. In my view – which I expressed before in ‘Between facts and norms: Testing compliance with Article 8 ECHR in immigration cases’ – the test to determine whether such obligation exists is unclear and would benefit from clear guidance from the Court.