Acceptance or Resistance? Tracing the Reception of International Judicial Decision Within Asylum Decision-Making in Denmark

Over the past decade, international courts have come under considerable pressure. While a sizable literature has thus examined instances of politicization, contestation or even backlash against international courts and judicial bodies, comparatively less is known about in how far such pressure has translated into how international judicial decisions are received within the day-to-day operations of domestic legal systems. Such questions, however, are particularly pressing within areas such as asylum and migration law, which not only saw a significant increase in international case law related to this field in recent years, but also an ever-growing prominence in political debates. At the same time, given that international refugee law lacks a dedicated international court as a central oversight mechanism, judicial dialogue has taken on more informal and decentralized forms, including between national courts and international judicial bodies in adjacent legal fields, making it difficult to trace empirically. To address these challenges, this paper examines how interpretive developments of international judicial bodies, and namely the European Court of Human Rights and UN human rights treaty bodies, are accepted or resisted within national asylum decision-making practices. To do so, it combines computational approaches with case cluster comparisons to systematically analyze an extensive dataset of over 15,000 decisions from the Danish Refugee Appeals Board (1995-2020). The paper thereby contributes to scholarship on the role of courts in asylum and migration governance, the interpretive authority and impact of international judicial decisions, as well as distinct forms of judicial dialogue within decentrally organized legal fields.