NQHR March 2020
| Author | Elif Erken,Antoine Buyse |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0924051920901365 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Editorial
NQHR March 2020
The start of a new year for the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights provides the opportunity to
both look back and forward. In this editorial, we would like to reflect on the performance of the
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights in 2019 and present you with our key statistics, as well as
to spend a few words on the present issue. Over the course of 2019, 80 manuscripts have been
submitted for consideration by the Board of the Netherlands Quarterly out of which 16 have
featured as articles in the Quar terly’s issues. This means tha t our acceptance rate, through a
rigorous and triple-blind peer review process, is around one out of each five articles submitted.
Of the pieces published in 2019, the column ‘Human rights v. insufficient climate action: the
Urgenda case’ by Ingrid Leijten and the article ‘Between facts and norms: testing compliance with
Article 8 ECHR in immigration cases’ by Mark Klaassen have been most read so far. The end of
2019 was marked by a particular highlight as we published a special issue bringing together five
articles on migration, gendered borders and human rights.
The present issue will certainly engage our NQHR readership again. Our NQHR Executive
Board Member, Jasper Krommendijk, has written this issue’s column in which he critically
evaluates the UN treaty body system and introduces and explores some proposals to make this
system and the process of State reporting more effective. This issue further features three articles.
Kristin Henrard in her article ‘Integration reasoning at the ECtHR: challenging the boundaries of
minorities’ citizenship’, adopts a citizenship lens to review two European Court of Human Rights
cases, notably, S.A.S. v France and Osmanoglu and Kocabas v Switzerland. In doing so, she
evaluates the Court’s jurisprudence and discerns a new line of jurisprudence, one that ‘explicitly
uses integration reasoning in the justification of limitations to minorities’ fundamental rights’.
Critical of this approach, she puts forward a number of recommendations to the Court as to how to
proceed in relation to integration reasoning and minorities’ substantive citizenship. Moritz Baum-
ga¨rtel, in his article ‘Facing the challenge of migratory vulnerability in the European Court of
Human Rights’ also focuses on the Strasbourg Court. He introduces the concept of migrant
vulnerability in an effort to remedy the shortcomings borne out of the difficulty on the part of
both the Court and scholarship to ‘integrate the lived experience of migrants into legal reasoning
that underlies a determination of human rights violations’. Finally, Elif Durmus in her article ‘A
typology of local governments’ engagement with human rights: Legal pluralist contributions to
international law and human rights’ explores the engagement of local governments with human
rights law. Drawing upon empirical research data, she maps this phenomenon and proposes a
typology of local governments’ engagement with human rights, in doing so demonstrating that
local authorities are relevant actors in the protection and promotion of human rights.
This issue, as well as all those of 2019, would not have been what they are without the
contribution of our authors and the critical review process of our Executive and international
Board members. As always, our publisher SAGE has provided indispensable help and we remain
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights
2020, Vol. 38(1) 3–4
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0924051920901365
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