In May 2025, the infamous “letter of the nine” was published. In it, the governments of nine European states laid out their vision of various anti-migrant policies and called for “a new and open minded [sic.] conversation about the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights”. The case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), they claimed, has “resulted in the protection of the wrong people”. The call was taken up by other states and the Council of Europe, even as the letter itself was broadly opposed by various academic and civil society initiatives. All this has now culminated in the Chişinău Declaration of 15 May 2026, which is less blatantly anti-migrant than the letter of the nine yet still places a clear emphasis on states’ interests in preventing migration in ever more restrictive ways.
In this blogpost, I propose to analyse these developments through the lens of fascization. Recently repopularised among others by Pierre Zaoui and Patrick Eiden-Offe, thinking in terms of fascization offers an analysis of current dynamics that captures the urgency of the moment while not relying on historical analogies as strongly as the term “fascism” does. Some texts in the recent literature on fascism perform a similar move by using qualifiers (emergent fascism, late fascism, and so on). To speak of “fascization” combines this sensibility with the procedural purview typical of “-ization” approaches. The question is not, then, whether a certain regime, institution, or person is or is not fascist, but rather whether, how and in what forms a process of fascization is taking place – and how to oppose it. Raising these questions, I argue, both situates recent developments in the Council of Europe in their broader context and allows for a reevaluation of the politics of the European system of human rights itself.
Pushback over otherness
Academic and civil society responses to the letter of the nine were quite united in opposing its concrete suggestions for reform of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), but they mostly did so from a particular angle. A recent blogpost summarised the two main strands as follows: first, “to set the record straight, to set out the facts on migration and ECHR case-law”, thus debunking the idea that the ECHR system is “a main impediment to domestic migration policies”; and second, to “emphasize the value” of the ECHR. I will return to both of these lines of argument below. Their overall impetus is worth noting at the outset, however: especially when used in combination, these arguments seek to protect the system of European human rights, but have relatively little to say about the substantive politics driving the letter of the nine.
Some responses to the letter did highlight its many problematic framings and rhetorical devices, but often stopped short of explicitly naming the anti-migrant racism that underlies them and of situating the letter within the strengthening of right-wing politics in the last years and decades. To read it as part of the process of fascization would highlight these elements. In that vein, Hélène Tigroudja recently drew connections to developments in other regions and at the global level and thus interpreted the pushback against the ECtHR as a “symptom of a general and universal trend of State pushback over otherness, whatever face it has”. Indeed, the zealous pursuit of anti-migrant policies can be read alongside, for example, anti-Muslim and other forms of racism, anti-trans and anti-queer policies, and repression of the climate justice and Palestine solidarity movements (the latter itself often laden with an anti-migrant twist).
Fascization can be understood as the combined effect of these various forms of “pushback over otherness”. Most accounts of fascization in one way or another highlight the politics of “us versus them”, the dehumanisation of the Other, or the violent reaction to the presence of “surplus” populations as a central element. And while the Others thus constructed are manifold, anti-migrant racism plays a central role – which also explains why migration is so central to the pushback against the ECtHR. As A. Naomi Paik and Catherine S. Ramírez put it the US-American context, “immigration constitutes a leading edge of fascism today”, not only because migration law provides “today’s fascist infrastructures” but also because “it has become such a sharply honed weapon for dividing ‘us’ and ‘them’”. The letter of nine, with its repeated emphasis on “our societies” and “our countries” in contrast to the migrants that it targets (those referred to as the “wrong people” in the sentence quoted at the outset), is likewise imbued with this logic.
The state-friendly approach of European human rights
Understanding the letter of the nine as an element of increasing fascization, then, helps to refocus its substantive politics and to situate it in relation to similar and interlinked dynamics in other regions, institutions, and contexts. But it also provides a different perspective on the migration-related politics of the system of European human rights itself. To develop this point, let me revisit the two above-mentioned lines of argument in defence of the ECHR in turn. The first of the two was to demonstrate that the ECtHR’s case-law does not drastically interfere with the states parties’ migration policies. The Court itself took this approach by offering summaries and figures pertaining to its case-law. Some academic interventions analysed the case-law in more detail and concluded, for example, that “Strasbourg case law shows a lot of understanding for the problems of states, and its impact on the number of deportations is small”.
Such analyses can be read in at least two ways. As a strategic intervention into the ongoing debates, they aim to placate states: from the states’ perspective, the case-law isn’t that bad because the ECtHR rarely challenges their policies. Simultaneously, however, they are an indictment of the Court: from the perspective of migrants fighting for their rights, the case-law is bad, precisely because the ECtHR rarely challenges state policies. I have argued elsewhere that this holds true, in fact, even in cases where it finds a violation of the Convention. The infrastructures of mobility and migration control remain safely intact; pushback over otherness is possible within the framework of human rights as interpreted by the ECtHR.
It is telling that the Chişinău Declaration was able to retain the spirit of the letter of the nine while presenting itself as less confrontational vis-à-vis the Court. While it does try to nudge the ECtHR (as well as national courts) in an even more restrictive direction, it also builds on and reiterates the Court’s case-law to make its points. For example, it emphasises that states must be able to “expel or extradite” migrants, especially those “convicted or charged with a serious offence” and cites, in particular, the case-law according to which lack of healthcare in the receiving state is a hindrance only “in very exceptional circumstances”. As Vandita Khanna notes at the outset of her devastating critique of this line of case-law, it has deadly consequences: N., the applicant in the leading case of N. v. the United Kingdom – in which the Court found no human rights violation – died within months of her removal to Uganda.
Liberalism and fascism
The other main response to the letter of the nine, as noted above, was to insist on the “value” of the system of European human rights. For example, an early response letter by a large group of academics spoke of “the enormous success of the system” and urged the Council of Europe to ensure that it “remains a beacon of hope for all”. This kind of response sits uneasily with the one previously discussed. Hope for all? Certainly not for applicants like N., or for the many other migrants denied safe passage with the ECtHR’s assent or subsequently expelled if they managed to reach Europe.
There is a danger, then, that in rightly opposing the state-led reform initiatives, the value of the status quo of human rights protection is (perhaps strategically, perhaps due to genuine belief in the system) drastically overemphasised. Esra Demir-Gürsel has provided an excellent counterpoint to this tendency by emphasising the hierarchisations of people built into European human rights from the very beginning, including but not limited to the deliberate exclusion of migrants and colonized populations. She thus resists a story of progress that is only now facing potential reversal, instead foregrounding structural inequalities within the system itself.
To view the developments in the Council of Europe through the lens of fascization reinforces this approach. One of the advantages of the process-based purview of fascization is that it counters the tendency to see liberalism and fascism exclusively in opposition to one another; in that regard, it can draw on prior analyses of fascist elements within liberalism, notably those of the Black radical tradition. This kind of analysis resists the “liberal externalisation of fascism as the ultimate Other of democracy”, as Eiden-Offe puts it. Demir-Gürsel has previously traced precisely this process of externalisation in the context of the Council of Europe for a variety of “oppositional frames” such as totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Instead of such externalisation, the lens of fascization points us towards continuities and combined effects, including liberal institutions like the ECtHR in the scope of critical analysis.
Outlook
To think in terms of fascization, then, foregrounds the anti-migrant racism of initiatives like the letter of the nine and connects it to broader global dynamics of far-right ressurgence. But it also allows us to draw connections (not equivalences) between far-right anti-migrant policies and liberal institutions such as the Council of Europe. The notion of fascization itself does not provide easy answers but, like most forms of critique, raises different questions and points towards different forms of resistance – notably those that take less of a defensive stance based on the status quo of European human rights law. For if the latter is tied up in the hierarchisations of human life that contribute to fascization, then it cannot provide a viable politics for challenging them. What is needed instead is a substantive anti-fascist politics that opposes both anti-migrant racism and other elements of fascization, whatever their context.