The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled in several migration-related cases.

H.A. and Others v. Greece concerned the living conditions in the Moria migrant reception and idetification centre on the island of Lesbos. The application was filed by 67 migrants, some of whom alleged that they were placed in a "cage" for six or eleven days before being registered in 2017 and 2018. 

The Court held that the applicants' conditions of detention, in particular the overcrowding of the Moria prison at the time of the events and the resulting difficulties, were inhuman and degrading. The Court also noted that the applicants had no effective remedy in respect of these complaints. It found violations of article 3 (prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment) and of article 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

B.F. and Others v. Switzerland case concerned the refusal of requests for family reunification. The applicants residing in Switzerland were all recognised as refugees within the meaning of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and granted provisional admission rather than asylum, in line with the relevant Swiss legislation, since the grounds for their having refugee status were deemed to have arisen following their departure from their countries of origin and as a result of their own actions. Under domestic law, they therefore did not have a legal entitlement to family reunification in Switzerland, but family reunification was discretionary and subject to certain cumulative conditions being met. Their applications for family reunification were rejected. All applicants invoked Article 8 of the Convention; some of the applicants also invoked Article 14 of the Convention in conjunction with Article 8 of the Convention.

The Court held that there had been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention on account of the refusal of the requests for family reunification in relation to several applicants. It further found that there was no need to examine separately the complaints under Article 14 read in conjunction with Article 8 of the Convention in three separate applications.

S.E. V. Serbia - The Court found the violation of Article 2 of Protocol 4 (freedom of movement) of a Syrian national who lived in Belgrade from 2014 to 2022 and was granted refugee status in 2015. 

The case concerned the applicant’s complaint that he had not been able to travel outside Serbia for many years because his Syrian passport had expired and the Serbian authorities had rejected his request for a travel document for refugees. In particular, there was a legal lacuna given that respective Ministers of the Interior had not enacted regulations governing the content and design of travel documents for refugees since 2008, despite being required to do so by the Asylum Act.

In the case A.A. v. Sweden, the ECtHR held that the removal of a Lybian national after refusal of asylum claim would not entail a breach of the Convention, as the security situation in Libya was not such that there was a general need for international protection for asylum-seekers. In addition, the applicant had failed to substantiate a risk of being killed or subjected to ill-treatment on return.