What role does human rights law play in asylum adjudication? Beyond the obvious source material, it quickly becomes difficult to determine the contours of such a question. For how do boundaries get drawn between national law, institutional norms, principles of different international legal origin, and by whom precisely? A decision maker in Sweden, for instance, must not only navigate Swedish national laws and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, but also consider EU Directives, jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights, and interpretations from various authoritative UN bodies. Taking the Nordic region as a vantage point, this book explores how judicial intermediaries, at both supranational and domestic levels, give shape to the meaning and reach of human rights sources and norms.

The interplay between these different legal frameworks presents substantial practical challenges in the asylum domain. Case workers and judges must determine which standards apply, how to weigh competing interpretations, and how to react to new legal developments. These interpretative decisions point to core theoretical concerns that international lawyers and social scientists continue to grapple with: When do evolving human rights jurisprudence influence established refugee law practices? What authority does a UN human rights treaty body's interpretation have compared to a national court ruling? And at a fundamental level: How should we even understand the relationship between international and national law?